Hegel's Account of Contradiction in The Science of Logic Reconsidered

Hegel's Account of Contradiction in the Science of Logic Reconsidered
Karin de Boer
Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 48, Number 3, July 2010,

pp. 345-373 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/hph.0.0231
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Hegel’s Account of
Contradiction in the Science of
Logic Reconsidered
K ar i n d e B o e r
1. introduction
hegel’s philosophy is notorious for its alleged claim that all things are contradic-
tory. Whereas Marxists took this claim to support their view that the social-political
world exhibits “real” contradictions, non-Hegelian philosophers of various breeds
have used it to argue that Hegelian dialectic annihilates the very principle of
scientific reasoning.1 Yet, even if it is granted that Hegel did not intend to violate
the law of non-contradiction, the stakes of Hegel’s account of contradiction in the
Science of Logic are far from clear. According to Robert Pippin, Hegel’s claim that
all things are contradictory is “one of the most important, even if most obscure
things said in the Logic.”2 In what follows, I hope to remove such misunderstand-
ings of this claim as continue to thwart an adequate interpretation of Hegel’s
philosophy at large.3
In our days, Marxist readings of Hegel are generally thought to have become
obsolete. Recent debates on Hegel rather concerned the metaphysical or non-
Karl Popper, assuming that Hegel discarded the law of non-contradiction (“What is Dialectic?”,
1
Mind 49 [1940]: 403–26, at 418) considers it “dangerously misleading” to say that “contradictions
are not avoidable” (411). For him, Hegel’s philosophy “represents the worst of all . . . absurd and
incredible philosophic theories” (420).
R. Pippin, “Hegel’s Metaphysics and the Problem of Contradiction” [“Hegel’s Metaphysics”],
2
Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 (1978): 301–12, at 309.

Most criticisms of Hegel’s claim concerning the contradictory nature of things followed in the
3
wake of Trendelenburg’s Logische Untersuchungen (1840). For overviews of the debates on this issue,
see R.-P. Horstmann, “Schwierigkeiten und Voraussetzungen der dialektischen Philosophie Hegels,” in
Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels [Seminar], ed. R.-P. Horstmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1978), 9–30; S.-J. Kang, Reflexion und Widerspruch. Eine Entwicklungsgeschichtliche und systematische Unter-
suchung des Hegelschen Begriffs des Widerspruchs [Reflexion und Widerspruch], Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 41
(Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1999), 11–17.
Karin de Boer is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen
Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 48, no. 3 (2010) 345–373
[345]
346 j o u r n a l o f t h e h i s t o r y o f p h i l o s o p h y 4 8 : 3 july 2 0 1 0
metaphysical nature of the Science of Logic.4 For some reason, these debates largely
ignored the issue of contradiction, thus leaving the traditional assessments of He-
gel’s concept of contradiction to their own devices.5 The present article intends
to fill this gap by reconsidering Hegel’s account of the concept of contradiction
in the Science of Logic. Its second part—the Doctrine of Essence—contains a detailed
examination of the concepts constitutive of classical logical laws, including the
principle of non-contradiction. I hold that Hegel by no means denies the valid-
ity of this principle insofar as the natural sciences are concerned. I will contend,
however, that the text also contains remarks on contradiction that do not pertain to
the formal requirements of valid propositions at all. As I hope to show, these latter
remarks concern the principle of Hegel’s method, a method intended to comprehend
modes of thought—rather than “things”—as elements of a dynamic totality.
Only at the end of the Logic does Hegel discuss the nature of his method in a
systematic way. Since his preliminary remarks on the role of contradiction in this
method occur within a chapter devoted to traditional logic, it is difficult to grasp
the crucial difference between, on the one hand, Hegel’s account of the classical
principle of non-contradiction and, on the other, his references to the principle
of speculative science as such. In order to remove the obscurity of Hegel’s text it
will be necessary, therefore, to disentangle the various layers that together make
up the Doctrine of Essence.6
Influential non-metaphysical readings of Hegel’s Logic include K. Hartmann, “Hegel: A Non-

4
Metaphysical View,” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. A. MacIntyre (London: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1976), 104–12; R. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); P. Stekeler-Weithofer, Hegels analytische Philosophie.
Die Wissenschaft der Logik als kritische Theorie der Bedeutung (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1992). By
contrast, Houlgate maintains that Hegel’s Logic, notwithstanding its indebtedness to Kant, is concerned
with the innermost nature of being as such. See S. Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to
Infinity [The Opening of Hegel’s Logic] (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006), 124. For a
recent evaluation of this debate, see J. Kreines, “Hegel’s Metaphysics: Changing the Debate,” Philosophy
Compass 1 (2006): 466–80. Whereas, according to Kreines, non-metaphysical readings take Hegel to
be merely concerned with concepts or conceptual schemes, the metaphysical reading he endorses
affirms that Hegel’s philosophy includes an account of “what truly exists” (468; cf. 471, 472). Kreines
rightly notes that Kantian readings tend to underestimate Hegel’s philosophical ambitions (468). I
take the view, however, that Hegel aims to achieve not so much purely rational knowledge of reality
(convincingly precluded by Kant) as comprehensive knowledge of such conceptual determinations as
have been developed throughout the history of human thought (a mode of knowledge not precluded
by Kant’s criticism of metaphysics). On this view, Hegel’s reconstruction of these determinations is not
necessarily at odds with the task traditionally attributed to ontology.
For an exception in this respect, see B. Longuenesse, Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics [Hegel’s Critique],
5
trans. N. J. Simek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), albeit that the book was originally
published in French as early as 1981. Longuenesse’s interesting interpretation—which I only read
after finishing the present article—roughly covers the same ground as mine. Longuenesse equally
aims “to dispel persistent misunderstandings concerning Hegel’s notion of contradiction” (41). She
similarly does this, moreover, by focusing on the determinations of reflection exposed in the Doctrine
of Essence and on Hegel’s transformation of Kant. As will become clear below, however, my approach
differs from hers, first, with regard to the exact way in which Hegel moves beyond Kant and, second,
with regard to the “subject” of Hegel’s abstruse remarks on contradiction. Whereas she takes these
remarks to be concerned with objects such as they are constituted in thought (42), I take them to be
concerned with the pure concepts which Hegel—in line with Kant—considers to be presupposed in all
knowledge of objects.
Colletti summarizes the classical Marxist view of Hegel’s “cardinal principle” by saying that “one
6
can maintain with axiomatic certainty . . . that within every object in the universe there must be inner
contradiction in hegel’s science of logic 347
Although I do not wish to suggest that Hegel’s Science of Logic can be reduced to
the premises of Kant’s critical philosophy, I take the view that Hegel’s achievement
can only be measured by considering the extent to which he moved beyond these
very premises. Accordingly, the first layer I will examine consists in Hegel’s largely
implicit appropriation of Kant’s account of the so-called concepts of reflection
in the Critique of Pure Reason (sections 2 to 4). As we will see, the larger context
of Hegel’s discussion of the concept of contradiction roughly corresponds to the
section of the Critique entitled “On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection.”7
Although this section, in my view, greatly clarifies the general thrust of the Doctrine
of Essence, it does not suffice to dissolve the prevailing embarrassment concerning
Hegel’s remarks on the concept of contradiction. This task further requires an
contradiction.” Just as many other commentators, both Marxist and non-Marxist, Colletti proposes to
qualify Hegel’s remarks concerning the contradictory nature of things. See L. Colletti, “Marxism and
the Dialectic,” New Left Review 93 (1975): 3–29, at 26. Implicitly or explicitly, these commentators share
Trendelenburg’s view that Hegel unduly “ontologized” the notion of contradiction. In their opinion,
things are characterized by the opposition or conflict between contrary forces rather than by (logical)
contradictions. See, for example, P. F. Linke, “Über Fragen der Logik,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie
1 (1953): 354–58; W. Becker, Hegels Begriff der Dialektik und das Prinzip des Idealismus [Begriff der Dialektik]
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969), 58–59; G. Patzig, “Widerspruch,” in Handbuch philosophischer Grund-
begriffe, vol. 6, ed. H. Krings (München: Kösel-Verlag, 1974),1698–1702; S. Sayers, “On the Marxist
Dialectic,” in R. Norman and S. Sayers, Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (Brighton: The Harvester
Press, 1980), 14. Düsing rejects Hegel’s alleged denial of the law of non-contradiction. See K. Düsing,
Das Problem der Subjektivität in Hegels Logik [Das Problem der Subjektivität] (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1976),
317. Cf. also M. Wolff, Der Begriff des Widerspruchs. Eine Studie zur Dialektik Kants und Hegels [Der Begriff
des Widerspruchs] (Königstein: Hain,1981), 169. Wolff accepts what he calls Hegel’s objectification
of the contradiction. In a similar vein, Kang, Reflexion und Widerspruch, 207–08, argues that the Logic
provides a logical foundation for the claim that all things are characterized by the conflict between
real forces. In “Hegel’s Metaphysics,” Pippin seeks to clarify the claim that everything is inherently
contradictory by suggesting that for Hegel claims about the essence of something can only take the
form of s = p if ‘p ’ is identical to ‘s ’ (310). I do not quite see, however, how his recourse to modern
logic—concerned with propositions about things—should help to dissolve the obscurity of Hegel’s claim,
which, in my view, is neither concerned with things nor with propositions. Other accounts of Hegel’s
dialectics simply ignore the problem of contradiction. Cf. D. Henrich, “Hegels Logik der Reflexion,”
in Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 95–156; T. Pinkard, “The Logic of Hegel’s
Logic ” [“Hegel’s Logic ”], Journal of the History of Philosophy 17 (1979): 417–35.
I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft [KrV ], ed. R. Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1971);
7
translated as Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), B316–49. (Citations, in the usual fashion, refer to pages in the ‘A’ and ‘B’ editions.)
Longuenesse (Hegel’s Critique, 46–48) also points out the relevance of this section for Hegel’s treat-
ment of the determinations of reflection. While highlighting Kant’s explicit criticism of Leibniz in
this section, she does not dwell on the parallel between the critique of metaphysics Kant puts forward
in this section and Hegel’s critique of metaphysics in the Doctrine of Essence. Apart from Longuenesse,
Belaval is one of the very few commentators to have interpreted Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence against the
backdrop of Leibniz and Kant. Focusing on “On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection,” Belaval,
however, does not discuss Hegel’s concept of contradiction. See Y. Belaval, “La doctrine de l’essence
chez Hegel et chez Leibniz” [“La doctrine de l’essence”], in Y. Belaval, Études leibniziennes. De Leibniz à
Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Whereas Wolff, in Der Begriff des Widerspruchs, does consider the concept
of contradiction presented in the Doctrine of Essence in relation to Kant, he ignores the way in which
Hegel here draws on Kant’s discussion of the concepts of reflection in the Critique of Pure Reason. This
is also true of Düsing, Das Problem der Subjektivität, 221; and Kang, Reflexion und Widerspruch, 142–43.
Unlike these commentators, I interpret Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence as a whole in light of Kant’s discus-
sion of the concepts of reflection. Insofar as Hegel’s notion of contradiction is concerned, by contrast,
I argue that it cannot be adequately understood by taking one’s bearings from the classical principle
of non-contradiction accepted by Kant.
examination of the way in which the Logic—in the wake of Kant’s Critique—criticizes
pure reason such as it has informed the actual history of scientific and philosophical
thought. Hegel’s criticism of the concepts that emerged during this history, I will
argue, always sets out from the limited understanding of these concepts achieved
in the history of philosophy itself. This layer of the Doctrine of Essence emerges most
clearly in Hegel’s account of the classical logical laws derived from the concepts
“identity” and “opposition,” an account which I discuss in sections 5 and 6. Since
this account provides the context of Hegel’s remarks on contradiction, I will draw
on it to closely examine these remarks themselves (sections 7 and 8). Sections 9
and 10, finally, point out how the methodical principle that Hegel considers to
derive from the concept of contradiction actually informs his speculative logic, in
particular his analysis of the determinations of reflection themselves.
The present article takes its bearings from the view that Hegel’s Logic consists in
a philosophical reconstruction of the pure concepts brought about in the history
of scientific and philosophical thought.8 Whereas this history provides the Logic
with its “material,” Hegel abstracts from the actual history of thought in order to
comprehend the totality of its necessary moments. On this account, the Remarks
that complement the main text of the Logic do not deal with a different content
than the main text, but treat the same content from a more concrete angle. Since
I consider the Remarks to provide important clues for interpreting Hegel’s ex-
tremely abstract treatment of pure concepts in the main text, this article broaches
Hegel’s discussion of the concepts identity, opposition, and contradiction primarily
through the former. This focus on the historical dimension presupposed by the
main text will allow me, I hope, not only to develop a consistent interpretation of
Hegel’s conception of contradiction, but also, in the final sections, to shed new
light on the method that informs the Science of Logic as a whole.9
2. kant’s account of the concepts of reflection

In order to trace the Kantian strand of Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence, a brief examina-
tion of Kant’s account of transcendental reflection is in place.10 In the chapter
of the Critique entitled “On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection,” Kant
“In dealing with the determinations of thought which, instinctively and unconsciously, pervade
8
our spirit as such . . . the science of logic will also be a reconstruction of those [determinations of
thought] which are singled out by reflection and are fixed by it as subjective forms” (G. W. F. Hegel,
Wissenschaft der Logik I [LI ]; translated as Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller [Amherst, NY: Pro-
metheus Books, 1997], 30). ‘LII’ will refer to part two of the same work. Unless indicated otherwise
I refer to Hegel’s Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Moldauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1969–72). I have occasionally modified the translations. Throughout, cited page numbers
refer to the German text and English translation, respectively. For an elaboration of this view, see
my “The Dissolving Force of the Concept: Hegel’s Ontological Logic,” The Review of Metaphysics 57
(2004): 787–822, and On Hegel: The Sway of the Negative [On Hegel] (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010). The present article as a whole draws on the account of Hegel’s Logic presented in this book,
in particular insofar as Hegel’s conception of negativity is concerned.
Given the systematic focus of this essay, I will not be able to address the development of Hegel’s
9
thoughts on contradiction from the early Jena writings onward. See Düsing, Das Problem der Subjektivität;
Kang, Reflexion und Widerspruch.
10
For a more detailed treatment of this issue, see my “Pure Reason’s Enlightenment: Transcen-
dental Reflection in Kant’s first Critique,” Kant Yearbook 2 (2010): 53–73.
opposes both Leibniz and the adherents of the “Leibnizian-Wolffian doctrine”
by arguing that they purported to achieve knowledge of things by means of
logical reflection alone.11 Criticizing this metaphysics for its failure to distinguish
adequately the domains of science and speculation, the chapter devoted to the
concepts of reflection forms the hinge between the Transcendental Analytic and
the Transcendental Dialectic.
For Kant, reflection always proceeds by comparing the content of various
representations (A262/B318). This comparison underlies the very generation
of empirical concepts, the subsumtion of a given object under a concept, as well
as the combination of concepts in a judgment. According to Kant, I can only de-
termine the content of my representation as, for instance, a rose, by comparing
it to the content of the concept “rose” and by singling out what they have in com-
mon (A137/B176). Although this comparison relies on the concept of sameness
(Einerleikeit), it does not yet require logical reflection. We do reflect logically, by
contrast, when comparing the content of various concepts to one another in order
to form judgments (A261–62/B317–18; cf. A279/B335). In order to state that all
roses are plants, I must first have singled out the characteristics which the concept
“rose” and the concept “plant” have in common. The statement that some roses are
red, conversely, requires that I consider the object thought under the concepts
“rose” and “red” in view of its distinction from other objects thought under the
concept “rose” (A261–62/B317–18). Apart from sameness and distinctness, Kant
discusses three further pairs of concepts of reflection, including agreement and
conflict.12 Even though these concepts of reflection do not suffice to turn empiri-
KrV B330, cf. B326. I will abstract from the question as to whether Kant’s criticism of Leibniz is
11
pertinent. According to Malter, it is more to the point with regard to Wolff’s metaphysics. See R. Malter,
“Logische und transzendentale Reflexion. Zu Kants Bestimmung des philosophiegeschichtlichen Ortes
der Kritik der reinen Vernunft” [“Logische und transzendentale Reflexion”], Revue internationale de
philosophie 136–37 (1981): 284–301, at 297. The pertinence of Kant’s criticism of Leibniz is equally
questioned by G. H. Parkinson, “Kant as a Critic of Leibniz: The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection,”
Revue internationale de philosophie 136–137 (1981): 302–14.
The concepts of reflection treated in the Critique of Pure Reason are: sameness and distinctness
12
(Einerleikeit und Verschiedenheit), agreement and conflict (Einstimmung und Widerstreit), the inner and the
outer (das Innere und das Aüssere), and matter and form (Materie und Form). Kant distinguishes between
conflict (Widerstreit) and contradiction (Widerspruch) and generally uses the term ‘conflict’ to describe
the antinomies of reason. A proposition such as “the circle is square” is said to contradict itself (cf. KrV
B189–93). His discussion of the concept of conflict—considered as a concept of reflection—is very
sketchy. Drawing on his early treatise, Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitude into Philosophy
(1763), he notes that two equal powers that move into opposite directions are in conflict and, as such,
annul the effects of one another. Such real oppositions can occur only within the realm of phenomena
(KrV A265/B320–21; cf. A273/B329, A282/B338). If the understanding, on the other hand, assigns
various positive predicates (“realities”) to the same subject, then these predicates do not conflict logi-
cally (KrV A264–65/B320, A272/B328): something can be both red, round, and small. This obvious
principle only becomes problematic, in Kant’s view, if employed with regard to God or the world at
large, as Leibniz did when he maintained that all real entities are necessarily in agreement with one
another (KrV A282–83/B338–39; cf. A280/B336). In sum, Kant uses the term ‘contradiction’ with
regard to single propositions and the term ‘conflict’ with regard to both physics (contrary powers)
and metaphysics (contrary propositions). He accordingly distinguishes between analytic, real, and
dialectical oppositions (cf. KrV A273/B329, A504/B532). See on this Wolff, Der Begriff des Widerspruchs,
41–77. As far as Hegel is concerned, it should be noted that the chapter of the Encyclopedia devoted
to the determinations of reflection does not deal with the concept of contradiction, but is confined
to the concepts of identity, difference, and ground. The Science of Logic, by contrast, treats the concept
of ground in a separate chapter.
cal representations into objective judgments, any scientific knowledge necessarily
relies on them.
Kant holds that Leibniz misused this logical reflection for the purpose of
achieving a priori knowledge of things as such (A273/B329). In his view, Leibniz
committed a “subreption” (A268/B324) by tacitly moving from the domain of
empirical knowledge (where logical reflection is appropriate) to the domain
of ontology (where it does not suffice). Thus, Leibniz relied on the concept of
sameness to assert that things are identical if all of their intrinsic determinations
are identical. According to Kant, this claim only makes sense insofar as things are
treated as mere noumena. Leibniz went wrong, in his eyes, by claiming the validity
of the principle of indiscernibility for the domain of the natural sciences as well.13
Yet these sciences are concerned not so much with the intrinsic determinations
of things as with objects that differ from one another at least with regard to their
spatial position. These objects are defined by relational rather than intrinsic de-
terminations (A265/B321). While the Leibnizians entangled themselves in vain
speculations concerning, for instance, the nature of monads (cf. A274/B330)
and the divisibility of substances (cf. A434–43/B462–471), Kant maintains—
throughout the first Critique—that philosophy should turn its inquiries to a priori
principles that govern scientific knowledge rather than metaphysics.
According to Kant, Leibniz’s philosophy can be traced back to its failure ad-
equately to distinguish between phenomena and noumena. The mode of reflection
to which Kant assigns this task—transcendental reflection—is as pure as logical
reflection, yet considers given representations in view of the cognitive faculties to
which they belong, namely, either sensibility or the understanding.14 Just as logical
reflection precedes the formation of empirical judgments, transcendental reflec-
tion should precede the philosophical investigation into the a priori principles of
all knowledge.
Kant notably illustrates the function of this transcendental reflection by pointing
out how Leibniz failed to perform what he calls the “duty” of philosophy (A263/
B319). I take him to mean that Leibniz considered things as such by means of con-
cepts of reflection that actually pertain to noumena alone. Leibniz, that is, conceived
of these things in terms of the sameness and agreement of the characteristics thought
under their concepts, and he regarded these characteristics as intrinsic to the things
Leibniz, Kant notes, extended “his principle of indiscernables, which holds merely of concepts
13
of things in general, to the objects of the senses . . . and thereby believed himself to have made no
little advance in the cognition of nature” (KrV A271–72/B327–28; cf. A42–44/B59–62, A60–61/
B85, A281/B337).
KrV A262/B318. See Malter, “Logische und transzendentale Reflexion,” for a clarifying discus-
14
sion of the role of transcendental reflection in Kant’s criticism of Wolff and the history of philosophy
at large. For a detailed examination of Kant’s account of the concepts of reflection and the histori-
cal context from which it emerged, see B. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and
Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. C. T. Wolfe (Princeton-
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 107–66. In line with the aim of the book as a whole, her
analysis focuses on the relation between the logical forms of judgment and the concepts of reflection.
Longuenesse is primarily interested, moreover, in the role of logical reflection in the formation of
empirical concepts and judgments (11, 115, 131), and devotes almost no attention to transcendental
reflection (cf. 114).
themselves. Lastly, he considered these things—considered as the matter of thought—
to precede their spatio-temporal form (A271–76/B327–32). Whereas Leibniz
thus disregarded the opposites of each of these four concepts of reflection (A270/
B326), Kant suggests that these opposites constitute precisely the very characteris-
tics of the sphere of phenomena. These potential objects of scientific knowledge are
characterized by spatial distinctness, conflicting forces, and extrinsic determinations.
Moreover, their spatio-temporal form precedes their sensible matter. Taken together,
the four pairs of concepts of reflection allow transcendental reflection adequately to
distinguish the characteristics of the sphere of phenomena from those of the sphere
of noumena and, hence, to limit the domain of scientific knowledge to the former.
It is only within this sphere that understanding and sensibility can generate valid
synthetic a priori principles, laws of nature, and empirical judgments.
Yet Kant’s solution to the problem created by dogmatic metaphysics gave rise
to a new problem. Within two decades, philosophers realized that Kant’s clear-cut
opposition between the realms of sensibility and thought precluded a thorough
comprehension of the dynamic proper to life, spirit, and thought as such.15 Hegel’s
Doctrine of Essence is intended, in my view, to expose the limit of any philosophy—
including Kant’s—that holds on to a strict division between appearances and reality
as it is in itself.16 In the second chapter of the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel implicitly
sets out from Kant’s discussion of the concepts of reflection to achieve this aim.
3. hegel’s doctrine of essence

Hegel’s speculative logic differs from Kant’s transcendental logic by almost com-
pletely disregarding the role of pure concepts in the formation of empirical knowl-
edge. This abstraction allows Hegel to concentrate on the content of these con-
cepts themselves and, hence, to bring out the limits of the conceptual paradigms
15
Speculative science should not appeal to subordinate spheres of philosophy, Hegel maintains,
“for its determinations . . . are unfitted for higher spheres and for the whole. The latter occurs whenever
categories of the finite are applied to the infinite; the current determinations of force, substantiality,
cause and effect, and so on, are likewise merely symbols for expressing, for example, vital or spiritual
relationships, that is, they are untrue determinations . . . with respect to speculative relations as such”
(LI 386/325).
16
The Science of Logic, in particular the Doctrine of Essence, thus elaborates the task that Hegel had
set himself as early as in the Differenzschrift : “As culture developed, oppositions that used to have signifi-
cance as spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and intellect, freedom and necessity, etc. . . . took the
shape of the opposition between reason and sensibility, intelligence and nature. . . . The sole interest
of reason consists in resolving such rigidified oppositions” (G. W. F. Hegel, “Differenz des Fichteschen
und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie,” in Jenaer Schrifte 1801–1807, translated as The Difference
between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf [Albany: SUNY Press,
1977], 21/90; cf. 27–28/96, 115/174). In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel praises Kant’s account of the
antinomies of reason because he conceived of thesis and antithesis at least “as absolutely heteroge-
neous. . . . And indeed, in comparison with the defective and unsubstantial connection of freedom
and necessity, of the intelligible and the sensible world, their completely pure separation has the merit
of [permitting] the pure positing of their absolute identity. Yet this is not what Kant had in view when
he separated them so purely” (G. W. F. Hegel, “Glauben und Wissen oder Reflexionsphilosophie der
Subjektivität in der Volständigkeit ihrer Formen als Kantische, Jacobische und Fichtesche Philosophie”
[FK], in Jenaer Schrifte 1801–1807, translated as Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris
[Albany: SUNY Press, 1977], 320/84). Contrary to these early texts, The Doctrine of Essence focuses on
the basic conceptual paradigm that underlies such oppositions as that between spirit and matter.
they define.17 Yet this is not to say that Hegel departs from Kant’s transcendental
philosophy in all respects. When he presents the Science of Logic as “the system of
pure reason” (LI 43/49), he clearly recalls Kant’s view that such a system should
be elaborated on the basis of his critique of pure reason.18 To be sure, Hegel’s
Logic moves beyond Kant’s critical philosophy in that it no longer treats the basic
elements of this system—pure concepts—from a subjective point of view.19 And
whereas Kant’s first Critique largely abstracts from the historical development of
pure reason, the Logic reconstructs the totality of pure concepts that have evolved
in the history of scientific and philosophical thought.20
However, a truly philosophical comprehension of these concepts calls for a
method that takes the form of a strict deduction, for it must proceed independently
of any external considerations.21 Thus, even though pure concepts such as being,
substance, or identity have actually been put forward by individual philosophers,
Hegel abstracts from this historical dimension in order to comprehend their to-
tality. In line with Kant, he therefore assigns the production of pure concepts not
so much to individual human beings as to pure thought (cf. A55/B79). Unlike
Kant, Hegel treats pure thought as the a priori source of the concepts that have
informed the history of the sciences and of philosophy itself. Accordingly, he refers
to its principle as the concept as such (LI 30/39).
Hegel also assigns the activity of “reflection” to pure thought. He uses this term,
as we will see, to characterize the possible ways of determining the concept in
terms of essence. At the beginning of the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel briefly discusses
these possible determinations of essence, which he takes to have informed the
most basic paradigms of scientific and philosophical thought. The most abstract
“[The determinations of reflection] must be considered in themselves, that is, we have to con-
17
sider what their own reflection is” (LII 70/436; cf. 37/410; LI 30/39, 61/64).
KrV A11/B25; cf. Axxi/Bxxxvi, Bxxii–xxiii, B869, B860.
18
“[M]ore precisely, this objectifying act, freed from the opposition of consciousness, can be
19
considered as thought as such. But this act should no longer be called consciousness; consciousness
contains within itself the opposition of the ego and the object, an opposition which is not present in
that original act” (LI 60/62–63). Cf.: “Although critical philosophy had already turned metaphysics
into logic, it . . . attached an essentially subjective meaning to the logical determinations. . . . But the
liberation from the opposition of consciousness . . . demands that the [determinations of thought] be
considered . . . as that which is logical and the product of pure reason” (LI 45/51).
“The same development of thought which is exposed in the history of philosophy is exposed
20
in philosophy itself, but in the latter this development is liberated from historical externality and oc-
curs purely in the element of thought” (G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften
im Grundrisse I [Enc I ], translated as Hegel’s Logic, trans. W. Wallace [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975],
§14; cf. LI 30/39–40, LI 43/49). Cf. also G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie
I [LHP I ], translated as Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane and H. Simson
(Lincoln-London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 49/30.
The Logic proceeds by means of “a continuous, pure course in which nothing extraneous is
21
introduced” (LI 49/54; cf. 17/28, 55/59, 68–69/70; LII 252/582). Many commentators have high-
lighted the immanence of Hegel’s speculative method. See for example D. Henrich, “Anfang und
Methode der Logik,” in Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 73–94, and Houlgate,
The Opening of Hegel’s Logic. I take the view, however, that this emphasis tends to downplay the fact that
the concepts which are subjected to this method are not invented by Hegel, but have actually emerged
in the history of scientific and philosophical thought. This point is stressed by Pinkard, “Hegel’s
Logic,” 418–21, 431, and H. F. Fulda, “Unzulängliche Bemerkungen zur Dialektik,” in Seminar, ed.
R.-P. Horstmann, 33–69, at 39–40. However, Pinkard and Fulda no less concentrate on the immanent
development of the Logic.
determination of the relation between essence and its counterpart is that between
the essential and the unessential (LII 18/394). The relation between essence and
the realm of immediately given beings can also be determined—and has been
determined so—as semblance (Schein). This latter determination of essence un-
derlies, Hegel notes, both skepticism and the modern idealism of Leibniz, Kant,
and Fichte (LII 20–21/397).
Yet the dualism implied by this determination of essence cannot, in the long
run, prevail. According to Hegel, the sphere of semblance is not foreign to that
of essence, but results from essence’s own effort to establish itself as essence (LII
22/398). This might be clarified by means of the following example. The good
as such only emerges as the essence of any moral act by distinguishing itself from
the acts through which it appears. These acts, in turn, only emerge as moral acts
in light of the good as such. Seen in this way, essence and semblance presuppose
rather than exclude one another. For Hegel, the term ‘essence’ does not designate
a self-identical substrate, but pertains to the movement in which it distinguishes
itself from its contrary and reflects itself in the latter. That is why Hegel maintains
that “essence in this its self-movement is reflection” (LII 24/399).
This reflection has allowed thought to grasp, for instance, a particular act as
moral act, and, conversely, to grasp the good as such as the essence of such acts.
If one isolates these contrary conceptual determinations from this movement,
nothing remains. For the good itself is nothing apart from its appearance in actual
deeds, and, seen from a moral point of view, these deeds are nothing apart from
their finite reflection of the good as such. This is what Hegel means, it seems to
me, when he notes that the reflecting movement enacted by essence “is the move-
ment from nothing to nothing and so back to itself” (LII 24/400). Thus, essence
and semblance owe their meaning exclusively to the reflection in which essence
establishes itself as essence. Just as the good is reflected in moral acts, the essence of
a rose is reflected in the actual rose that I see, touch, and smell. This presupposes,
according to Hegel, that the pure concepts of essence and semblance themselves are
also reflected into one another. I cannot define the essence of something, that is,
without presupposing the conceptual unity of essence and semblance.
However, the actual history of philosophy testifies precisely to the incapacity of
thought to comprehend essence and semblance—or essence and appearance—in
terms of this “pure absolute reflection.”22 Insofar as pure thought has produced
conceptual oppositions such as that between infinity and finitude, identity and dif-
ference, or form and matter, it is, on Hegel’s account, dominated by the understand-
ing.23 Since pure understanding is, in this case, not engaged in determining objects,
LII 25/400. Cf.: “[I]t is this reflection which, in one and the same activity, distinguishes the
22
two sides of equality and inequality, hence contains both in one activity, letting the one appear and
reflect in the other” (LII 55/423). According to Hegel, the determination of essence in terms of
“appearance” testifies to the mutual dependence of essence and its contrary to a larger extent than
its determination in terms of “semblance” (cf. LII 125/479–80). In what follows, I will disregard the
difference between semblance and appearance and, if the Doctrine of Essence as a whole is concerned,
refer to the distinction between essence and appearance only.
Unlike texts such as the Differenzschrift, the Logic tends to avoid references to Kant’s distinction
23
between subjective modes of thought such as understanding and reason. However, the Logic, no less
than the earlier texts, presupposes this crucial difference (cf. LI 16–17/27–28, 140/130, 160/145;
LII 285–88/610–12).
Hegel refers to it as a mode of reflection, more precisely as “external reflection” or
even “self-alienated reflection.”24 Dependent on the mode of reasoning character-
istic of common sense, this form of philosophical reflection fails to grasp the unity
of contrary determinations. Insofar as the conceptual oppositions it produces can
be traced back to finite ways of determining essence as such, they are treated in the
Doctrine of Essence. The Encyclopedia characterizes this part of the Logic as follows:
This (most difficult) part of the Logic mainly contains the categories of metaphysics
and of the sciences as such,—as the products of reflective understanding, which at
once assumes the independence of the distinctions and affirms their relativity. (Enc I,
§114, rem.)
External reflection is a mode of pure thought that defines essence in terms of its
opposition to the inessential, semblance, or appearance, that is, in terms of two
ontological spheres that exclude one another. This is what Hegel calls their reflec-
tion into themselves (LII 34/407). The Logic considers the “sphere of reflection”
(LII 46/417) that results from this mode of thought as the conceptual paradigm
which has dominated the history of both the sciences and philosophy from Plato
onward. On the one hand, this paradigm allowed thought to rise above the sphere
of empirical knowledge so as to define the essence of beings. On the other hand, it
prevented thought from grasping the unity of the two realms it thus distinguished.
On this account, Kant’s transcendental distinction between that which is given in
sense perception (appearances) and that which can merely be thought (things in
themselves) constitutes a particular instantiation of this paradigm. As such, it testi-
fies no less to the sway of external reflection than Platonism or Leibnizianism.25
I have argued above that Kant considers transcendental reflection not only to
disentangle the realms of phenomena and noumena, but also to limit the domain of
scientific knowledge to the former realm. Now it is the aim of the Doctrine of Essence
to expose the limits of the conceptual paradigm defined by this very opposition.
However, Hegel does not develop his internal criticism of external reflection by
straightforwardly opposing his own insights to those achieved by dogmatic meta-
Hegel considers this mode of thought notably to define modern philosophy: “But reflective
24
understanding took possession of philosophy.” This mode of thought “holds on to its separations” (LI
38/45; cf. LII 39/412, 50/420, 55/424). I take the view that the Doctrine of Being treats pure concepts
that are employed to determine objects rather than to reflect on these objects in light of the distinc-
tion between essence and appearance. The distinction between the Doctrine of Being and the Doctrine of
Essence thus corresponds to Kant’s distinction between a determining and a reflective faculty of judg-
ment. If philosophy assigns an isolated determination of reflection such as “identity” to things in an
immediate way, Hegel notes, it mistakes this determination for a quality, that is, for a determination
that belongs to the sphere of being (LII 37/410).
“[T]he world that is reflected into itself, the world such as it is in itself, opposes itself to the world
25
of appearances. Yet being such as it appears and essential being are, as such, related to one another”
(LII 125/479–80). Kant argues, of course, that the concepts of the understanding can only be applied
to contents given in sense perception. Accordingly, philosophy should refrain from determining such
contents as can merely be thought, that is, from determining reality as it is in itself. Although Kant thus
restricts the understanding to the sphere of phenomena, his distinction between the twofold way in which
the contents of thought can be given at all corresponds to the classical, Platonic distinction between
appearance and essence. I completely agree with Malter, “Logische und transzendentale Reflexion,”
who, without referring to Hegel, claims that Kant’s “Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection” contains
a comprehensive critique of the history of philosophy as a whole (286–87). It is for this reason that
Hegel, in my view, could use this chapter as the foil of his Doctrine of Essence.
physics and Kant’s critical philosophy. His strategy rather consists in setting out
from the purported truth achieved by external reflection itself so as to make it
aware of the untenability of its initial position.26 Thus, Hegel seeks to demonstrate
that what external reflection takes to be the true content of a particular principle
is at odds with its true, speculative content. That is why Hegel, in my view, dwells
on the determinations of reflection as conceived by both traditional formal logic
and the metaphysics that relied on this logic.27 The next section considers Hegel’s
implicit discussion with Kant on this subject.
4. hegel’s conception of the determinations

of reflection
The second chapter of the Doctrine of Essence is titled “The Essentialities or De-
terminations of Reflection.” Its three main sections investigate the concepts of
identity, difference, and contradiction. Interestingly, Hegel refers to Kant’s cor-
responding treatment of the concepts of reflection only once, in the introduc-
tory section of the Doctrine of the Concept. He there characterizes the sphere of the
concepts of reflection as “a sphere lying between intuition and understanding or
between being and the concept” (LII 257/586). Since the three parts of the Logic
are devoted to the spheres of being, essence, and the concept, Hegel apparently
considers Kant’s account of the concepts of reflection to be concerned with the
sphere of essence.
Although Hegel does not explicitly refer to the corresponding section of the
Critique of Pure Reason, he clearly takes his bearings from Kant’s suggestion that
transcendental reflection establishes the very distinction between phenomena and
noumena.28 However, Hegel does not differentiate between the ways in which Leib-
This aspect of Hegel’s method is explained much more clearly in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
26
With regard to sense-certainty, Hegel here notes that “we do not have to reflect on [the object] and
consider what it might truly be, but all we have to do is to examine the way in which sense-certainty
relates to this object” (G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phen], ed. H.-F. Wessels and H. Clair-
mont [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988], translated as Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 70–71/59). Therefore “we must enter the same point . . . [as
sense-certainty], let the truth be shown to us, that is, let ourselves be transformed into the very ‘I’ that
knows [its object] with certainty” (Phen 74/63). This identification allows Hegel to push each particular
mode of thought toward acknowledging its insufficient grasp of its proper principle. I take the view that
this aspect of the speculative method no less governs the Logic, though in a less perspicuous way. The
Introduction to the Logic mentions the Phenomenology as an example of the “true method of speculative
science” (LI 49/53–54). As I see it, the Logic treats the conceptual determinations produced by pure
thought in the same way as the Phenomenology treats particular modes of consciousness.
For a clear account of Hegel’s discussion of common logic in the Science of Logic, see R. Hanna,
27
“From an Ontological Point of View: Hegel’s Critique of the Common Logic” [“Ontological Point of
View”], Review of Metaphysics 40 (1986): 305–38. I agree with Hanna’s view that Hegel accepts the role
of this logic in the natural sciences, but seeks to demonstrate that it is not suited for the purposes of
philosophy (cf. esp. 308–09, 327).
Hegel, I would contend, replaces the Kantian notion of “concepts of reflection” with his no-
28
tion of “determinations of reflection” because he does not regard “identity” such as it is traditionally
conceived as a concept proper. Insofar as it is opposed to “difference,” “identity” is merely a one-sided
determination of a concept that itself embraces its contrary determinations. The Preface to the second
edition of the Science of Logic refers indiscriminately to “forms of thought” (LI 19/19–20), “determina-
tions of thought” (22/33, 28/38, 30/39), “categories” (27/37), and “concepts” (28/38). It should
be noted that Hegel at one point attributes “the examination of the determinations of thought in and
niz and Kant opposed these two realms, nor does he mention their contrary motives
for doing so. Moreover, he does not eschew the concept of essence to characterize
the products of transcendental reflection taken in a broad sense.29 He points out,
accordingly, that the Doctrine of Essence elaborates the system of determinations of
reflection and, as such, constitutes a “mediating sphere” between the Doctrine of
Being and the Doctrine of the Concept. This sphere, he notes, consists in
the concept qua system of determinations of reflection, that is, a sphere of being
insofar as being is turning into the in-itself of the concept, such that, in this way, the
concept . . . remains at once fettered by immediate being as something external to
it.30
This remark suggests that the Doctrine of Essence as a whole is devoted to the de-
terminations of reflection. Actually, however, only the second chapter contains
this term in its title. Clearly, this chapter treats the most formal determinations
of reflection, that is, the concepts that constitute the content of classical logical
principles. As I see it, the Doctrine of Essence conceives of these formal concepts as
just one kind of pure concepts produced by the reflective understanding, which,
as such, creates the very paradigm based on the distinction between essence and
appearance.
Insofar as concepts are conceived by this mode of reflection, we have seen, they
tend to exclude their contrary. Rather than presenting themselves as mutually
dependent, they purport to be indifferent to one another and “stubbornly oppose
their movement” (LII 31/405). This also holds true for identity and difference.
In line with external reflection itself, Hegel introduces the concept of identity
as a way of determining the essence of something that completely abstracts from
the relation between identity and difference. Seen in this way, identity does not
testify to the movement of reflection at stake in the Doctrine of Essence as a whole.
However, Hegel considers even the concept of identity to result from reflection.
Since it does not explicitly oppose its counterpart, he notes that identity results
for themselves” to Kant (LII 559–60/833). Although Kant’s account of the concepts of reflection falls
within the part of the Critique that is devoted to the faculty of judgment (Urteilskraft), Kant does not
explicitly conceive of transcendental reflection as a particular mode of this faculty. This may be related
to the fact that the first Critique does not yet explicitly distinguish between a determining and a reflective
faculty of judgment, a distinction that only occurs in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. See I. Kant,
Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. K. Vorländer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), Introduction §4, §69,
translated as Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), xxv–xxviii, 311–13. The first chapter of the Doctrine of Essence refers to Kant’s
introduction of this distinction in the third Critique (LII 30/404), but Hegel does not come back to it
in his actual discussion of the determinations of reflection.
Thus, Hegel characterizes the concepts of contradiction and ground as determinations of
29
essence (LII 75/440, 69/435). He refers to the preceding determinations of reflection (including
identity, difference, and opposition) as “determinations of essence that are contradictory in them-
selves” (LII 68/434).
LI 58/61. The chapter of the Doctrine of Essence devoted to the determinations of reflection only
30
discusses the first two pairs of Kant’s concepts of reflection, that is, the most formal ones, though not
in the same way as Kant. Hegel considers the other two pairs in later chapters of the Doctrine of Essence.
On this, see Belaval, “La doctrine de l’essence.” Starting out from Kant’s criticism of Leibniz, Belaval
points out certain similarities between Hegel and Leibniz. However, his interesting study does not
relate Kant’s distinction between sensibility and understanding to the ontological distinction between
essence and appearance at stake in Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence as a whole.
from immediate reflection (LII 39/411). Contrary to determinations of reflection
such as difference or opposition, this most abstract determination of reflection
does not explicitly testify to the role of external reflection. This distinction between
implicit and explicit reflection allows Hegel to treat all determinations of reflection
as particular determinations of essence, that is, as conceptual pairs that presuppose
and instantiate the reflecting of essence and semblance into one another.
Hegel notes that these determinations of reflection used to occur in the form
of isolated principles or propositions (Sätze).31 In various Remarks he discusses the
classical principles of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle.32 He
does this, however, to extricate their conceptual content from their propositional
form. In his view, pure concepts such as identity, difference, and opposition should
not be treated as predicates to be attributed to “all things” (LII 37/410). In fact,
they should not be considered as predicates at all, but rather as forms of pure
thought which, as such, deserve close examination.33 In order to clarify this I first
turn to the Remarks in which Hegel discusses the principles of traditional logic.
5. the concept of identity

Hegel suggests in the first Remark that external reflection treats “identity” and
“difference” as more or less independent concepts (LII 39/412). It is justified in
doing so, I would like to add, insofar as these concepts are used with regard to
empirical representations. If I regard a rose from the perspective of identity, I focus
on that which the content of my empirical representation has in common with
other roses or with the content of the concept “rose.” If I regard the same rose
from the perspective of difference, on the other hand, I focus on those elements
that it does not have in common with other roses or with the concept of a rose.34
LII 36/409. Hegel maintains already in the Phenomenology that the classical, formal laws of thought
31
adopted by observing reason do not constitute the true principles of philosophical thought. He sees
it as the task of “speculative philosophy,” as yet to be developed, to show that these laws do not hold
absolutely (Phen 202/181). This task is actually achieved in the Logic. Since Hegel, in agreement with
German custom, uses the term ‘Satz’ rather than ‘Gesetz’ to refer to the principles of classical logic, I
will use the term ‘principle’ instead of ‘law’ in this context.
According to Hegel’s rather minimal description, the principle of identity (A = A) states that
32
everything is equal to itself (LII 41/413). The principle of non-contradiction declares that A cannot
simultaneously be A and not-A (LII 45/416). The principle of the excluded middle maintains that
something is either A or not-A (LII 73/438). Hegel seems to hold that ‘A’ can refer to subjects (a
rose cannot simultaneously be a rose and not a rose) as well as to predicates that are attributed to
subjects (something cannot be simultaneously red and not-red; something is either red or not-red).
Hegel does not refer to Aristotle’s inaugurating treatment of the classical logical principles. For an
overview of the various meanings ascribed to the classical law of contradiction, see Wolff, Der Begriff
des Widerspruchs, 13–36.
Cf. LI 93/90–91. It might be argued that Hegel treats pure concepts as subjects rather than
33
predicates. Ultimately, however, he conceives of these “subjects” as particular determinations of the

concept as such (LI 30/39). Since the concept, in its turn, is the absolute principle of pure thought,
it can be considered to constitute the subject of both the actual history of thought and the Science of
Logic. It is only posited as such, however, in the Doctrine of the Concept (cf. LII 245/577).
External reflection, Hegel notes, “relates what is diverse to sameness [Gleichheit] and distinct-
34
ness [Ungleichheit]. This relation, which is a comparing, is external to these determinations themselves”
(LII 50/420). As we have seen, Kant likewise described the traditional, logical use of the concepts of
reflection as a comparing (KrV A262/B317–18). He also held the view that the transcendental use of
such concepts is a matter of reflection rather than mere comparison (KrV A262/B318–19). Hegel
The implicit use of such concepts as identity and difference in empirical judgments
is therefore not problematic. This is not to say, however, that such concepts are
suited to define the basic principles of thought as such.
The second Remark elaborates on the principle of identity, to which Hegel
refers as A = A. According to Hegel, this principle does not lead anywhere (LII
41/413), for it merely allows thought to state that each thing is what it is. Those
who maintain the absolute truth of this principle do not see, in his view, that they
thereby reduce the concept of identity to an abstract, one-sided determination (LII
41–42/413–14). Yet the logical principle that allows empirical thought to compare
its various representations contains more, Hegel claims, than it actually states:
Thus, the form of the proposition in which identity is expressed contains more than
simple, abstract identity; it contains this pure movement of reflection in which the
other appears only as semblance. (LII 44/415)
Hegel here seems to suggest that the very form of the proposition entails that a
subject is connected to a predicate that differs from the subject itself.35 This is
not the case in a proposition which states that a rose is a rose. Whereas such a
proposition, on the one hand, refers thought to possible predicates that might
be attributed to a rose, on the other hand, it suggests that none of them has any
significance. Hegel seems to hold, moreover, that the principle of identity relies on
a particular conception of the essential as such: it presupposes that the essence of
something is opposed to its transient determinations. However, external reflection
itself is not aware of the difference between essence and appearance on which the
principle of identity relies.
This also obtains of the classical principle of non-contradiction—or Satz vom
Widerspruch—which Hegel equally treats under the heading of the concept of iden-
tity. The somewhat rudimentary version of the principle of non-contradiction he
puts forward states that A cannot simultaneously be A and not-A.36 This principle
differs from the principle of identity merely by its negative form (LII 45/416).
Just as the principle of identity, the principle of non-contradiction presupposes
that the identity of something, that is, its essence, is nothing but the unity of its
contrary determinations.37 Both principles, Hegel notes, “contain more than is
meant by them,” that is, they contain absolute difference (LII 45/416). In line
would maintain against Kant, however, that transcendental reflection remains dependent upon the
premises of external reflection broadly conceived in that it does not grasp the unity of contrary de-
terminations.
See Hanna, “Ontological Point of View,” 330–31.
35
Kant considers the principle of non-contradiction to state that “no predicate pertains to a
36
thing that contradicts it” (KrV A151/B190). In Hegel’s definition, by contrast, ‘A’ seems to pertain
to subjects and predicates alike.
Unlike the principle of identity, Hegel maintains, the principle of non-contradiction posits A
37
and not-A as contrary determinations which pertain to one and the same thing, namely, A itself. He
suggests that this self-identical “A” underlies its possible determinations (A and not-A) and, as such,
already exhibits a less abstract mode of identity than the principle of identity: “In this principle,
therefore, identity is expressed—as negation of the negation” (LII 45/416). Thus, the principle of
non-contradiction implicitly refers to the speculative conception of identity that it cannot actually af-
firm, namely, the conception of identity as that which posits and resolves the opposition of its contrary
determinations. In this case, thought is no longer concerned with the external distinction between
various things, but with the way in which something distinguishes itself from itself (LII 46/417).
with Kant, but without mentioning him, Hegel seems to hold that both classical
principles contain a concept of identity that can be employed to distinguish the
essence of something—that which remains self-identical—from its actual, transient
appearance. Yet whereas Kant’s transcendental distinction between noumena and
phenomena reaffirms the classical ontological distinction between essence and ap-
pearance, Hegel argues, as we will see, that the true essence of something consists
in the unity of essence and appearance. As long as philosophy continues to oppose
essence and appearance, it will not be able to comprehend living beings, modes
of human culture, or modes of thought as exhibiting the effort to actualize their
essence from within, that is, to overcome the opposition between the inner and
the outer.
For Hegel, the principles of identity and non-contradiction presuppose the
concept of difference. Since neither principle actually expresses the unity of
identity and difference, however, he maintains that they are unsuited for philoso-
phy. Insofar as they do not allow philosophy to comprehend self-consciousness,
for instance, as the unity of pure self-consciousness and empirical consciousness,
they are “unfitted for higher spheres and for the whole.”38 As I see it, Hegel’s ac-
count of the principles of identity and non-contradiction is implicitly guided by
the question as to whether these principles adequately define the very relation
between essence and appearance, that is, whether philosophy itself should take
its bearings from them. Clearly, the answer to this question is “no.” As we will see,
the formal principles derived from the concept of difference do not fare any bet-
ter in this respect.
6. the concept of opposition

In his account of the concept of difference Hegel distinguishes between distinctness
(Verschiedenheit) and opposition (Gegensatz).39 When I consider arbitrary differences
between various roses, I do so on the basis of the concept of distinctness. When
I reflect on such non-arbitrary differences as that between light and darkness or
virtue and vice, by contrast, I necessarily presuppose the concept of opposition
(cf. LII 71–72/437). In what follows I will only consider Hegel’s treatment of the
concept of opposition.
Hegel notably considers the way in which this concept operates in the realms of
arithmetic and empirical knowledge.40 Within both realms, the contrary moments
LI 386/325. “What emerges from this consideration is, therefore . . . that the law of identity or
38
of contradiction, which is supposed to express merely abstract identity . . . as a truth, is not a law of
thought [Denkgesetz] but rather the opposite of it” (LII 45/416).
I will not follow Miller’s translation of ‘Verschiedenheit’ as ‘diversity’ (LII 47/418). The term
39
‘verschieden’ can mean both “various” and “different.” I hold that the latter meaning is more accurate
in this context, because this section of the Logic is no longer concerned with merely quantitative differ-
ences. Since the term ‘difference’ is already used to render ‘Unterschied’, I will render ‘Verschiedenheit ’
as ‘distinctness’. The mode of reflection that relies on the concept of distinctness allows thought to
determine in which respects things are like and unlike one another (LII 49/419). This comparison
is concerned with indifferent or arbitrary differences (LII 55/424). Kant also uses the concept “Ver-
schiedenheit” (translated as ‘difference’) in this sense (KrV A262/B317).
Actually, arithmetic is treated in the section on the concept of opposition (LII 60–64/427–31)
40
and empirical knowledge in the section on the concept of contradiction (LII 70–73/435–38). How-
of the concept of opposition emerge as the positive and the negative. External
reflection, Hegel notes, assumes that “something is in itself positive, outside the
relation to the negative; and [that] something is in itself negative, outside the
relation to the positive.”41 As Hegel points out, it is by dint of this opposition that
empirical thought tends to conceive of light as positive in itself and of darkness
as negative in itself. He suggests that this perspective prevents thought from com-
prehending light as the result of its struggle against darkness and darkness as the
result of its struggle against light.42
Within arithmetic, by contrast, the positive and the negative are not always
assigned to fixed contents in this way. Without realizing the true bearing of its in-
sight, external reflection here holds, for instance, that the same amount of money
can be determined as possession or debt, but that the amount of money itself is
neither positive nor negative.43 In this case, external reflection implicitly affirms
that the positive and the negative constitute contrary determinations—that is,
contrary moments—of a single conceptual perspective. However, external reflec-
tion achieves this insight only with regard to a most abstract form of thought. It is
not in the position to raise this insight into the principle of philosophical thought
itself. Had it done so, it would have been obliged to conceive of the very relation
between noumenon and phenomenon as grounded in a unity that posits and resolves
the opposition between its contrary moments. If philosophy is to achieve insight
ever, both sections are concerned with determinations of the relation between the positive and the
negative.
LII 59/427; cf. 70/436.
41
Hegel criticizes the view that light is merely positive and darkness merely negative (LII
42
71–72/437) if only because it does not allow thought to comprehend color as the result of their
interaction. Just as virtue is nothing positive in itself, but results from its struggle against its contrary,
light, he seems to hold, is nothing but the effort to overcome the moment of darkness it contains
within itself (LII 72/427).
LII 61/428. Hegel also refers to the example of an hour’s journey to the east and the same
43
distance traveled back to the west; neither direction is in itself positive or negative, but they do cancel
out one another (LII 61/428). The Remark devoted to arithmetic discusses various ways in which the
positive and the negative can be treated within this discipline. The more these opposed moments are
conceived as dependent upon their contrary, the more they are understood in accordance with the
speculative comprehension of the concept of opposition, that is, as a unity of interdependent mo-
ments (LII 57/425). Viewed from this perspective, the apparent independence of the positive and the
negative—their mutual indifference—constitutes a subordinate moment of the speculative concept of
opposition, a moment which external reflection tends to mistake for the whole: “in accordance with
this moment of external reflection the positive and the negative are indifferent to that first identity in
which they are only moments” (LII 57–58/426). See Belaval, “La doctrine de l’essence,” 282; Wolff,
Der Begriff des Widerspruchs, 67–68, 73–75, 81; Longuenesse, Hegel’s Critique, 61–63. As these authors
point out, some of the examples Hegel uses in this section already occur in Kant’s treatise, Attempt to
Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitude into Philosophy (1763). Kant here introduces a concept of
the negative that is completely relational: something, whether it is a mechanical force or a conceptual
determination, is not positive or negative in itself, but owes its positivity or negativity exclusively to
its relation to its counterpart. This view of real oppositions allows Kant—turning against Leibniz—
to understand how two contrary forces can be equally real and nevertheless annul one another. As
mentioned above, this conception recurs, though very briefly, in Kant’s treatment of the concept of
conflict qua concept of reflection in the first Critique (KrV A264–65/B320–21). Even though Hegel
may well have been familiar with Kant’s ideas on this subject, I do not agree with Wolff, who interprets
Hegel’s concept of contradiction primarily against the background of Kant’s understanding of conflicts
between equally real elements.
into this dynamic, according to Hegel, it will have to take its bearings from the
concept of contradiction.
7. the concept of contradiction

Hegel introduces the concept of contradiction by reconsidering the concept of
opposition from a speculative point of view. This means that he now completely
disregards the role of oppositions in arithmetic and empirical science. The con-
trary determinations of the concept of opposition present themselves, we have
seen, as the positive and the negative. Unlike the concept of identity, the concept
of opposition affirms that its contrary determinations owe their meaning to one
another.44 When I consider the content of the concept of the positive, that is, I will
immediately behold its relation to the negative. Or, as Hegel puts it, the concept of
the positive contains the negative within itself, and the same is true of the concept
of the negative. In this respect, each moment can be considered to constitute the
unity of its contrary determinations.
Yet external reflection, we have seen, tends to disregard the mutual dependence
of the positive and the negative. Due to the force of external reflection, even the
positive and the negative tend to present themselves as independent concepts:
the positive posits itself as that which is not the negative and vice versa. In this re-
spect, both contrary determinations attempt to affirm their independence of their
counterpart, thus excluding the latter from themselves:
As this whole, each is mediated with itself by its other and contains it. But further, it is
mediated with itself by the non-being of its other; thus it is a unity existing on its own
and excluding the other from itself. (LII 64–65/431)
Thus, whereas, on the one hand, both contrary moments presuppose their mutual
dependence, on the other hand, they tend to posit their independence. By doing
so they reduce themselves to abstract, one-sided moments.45 This double bind,
so to speak, is characteristic of the concept of opposition. As such, it also defines
the conceptual oppositions that are treated in the Doctrine of Essence as a whole.
Now Hegel introduces the concept of contradiction by claiming that the positive
and the negative which present themselves as independent concepts exhibit the
concept of contradiction:
Insofar as the independent determination of reflection, which owes its independence
to the contrary it contains within itself, at once excludes this contrary, it excludes . . .
its proper independence from itself. For this independence consists in containing
the contrary determination within itself. . . . It is thus the contradiction.46
Seen from a speculative point of view, any one-sided concept turns out to be
contradictory, for it can only affirm its independence of its counterpart by affirming
Even external reflection realizes that the positive “only has meaning” in its relation to the
44
negative, in other words, “that the negative itself is contained in the concept [of the positive]” (LII
71/436).
“They destroy themselves in that they determine themselves as self-identical, but in doing so rather
45
determine themselves as the negative, that is, as something that is identical to itself only by being
related to something else” (LII 67/433).
LII 65/431; cf. Enc I, §120.
46
its dependence on the latter, thus exhibiting the self-exclusion that characterizes
logical contradictions as well. Inconspicuously abandoning his reflections on the
concept of opposition, Hegel here suggests that any determination of reflection
contains a contradiction. This allows him to make the transition to the concept
of contradiction itself. In order to clarify the passage just quoted I will use the
relation between the positive and the negative, to which Hegel returns in the next
paragraph, as an example.
On the one hand, we have seen, the positive consists in the unity of its contrary
moments, for it has no meaning whatsoever apart from the negative. On the other
hand, it tends to posit itself as independent of its contrary. Put more concretely,
this means that the way in which the positive has actually emerged in the history of
thought—as an independent concept—is at odds with what it is in itself, namely,
the unity of its contrary moments. If we regard the positive and the negative from
the perspective of external reflection, we merely see an opposition between fixed
concepts. Seen from a speculative point of view, by contrast, the positive turns out
to suffer from the contradiction between what it is in itself (the unity of its contrary mo-
ments) and what it has actually become (a determination opposed to its contrary),
and the same is true of the negative. By no means does Hegel claim, I would con-
tend, that the positive and the negative—or any other opposites—contradict one
another.47 Hegel would certainly agree that mutually exclusive concepts give rise
to a contradiction if they are simultaneously attributed to the same thing. But the
Logic is not concerned with the attribution of concepts to things. Hegel’s point is
rather that both the positive and the negative, qua concepts, contradict themselves.
For insofar as they actually posit themselves as independent of their contrary, they
contradict their ultimate principle, that is, their unity or mutual dependence. This
is, in my view, also the gist of the following passage:
The contrary determinations [Entgegengesetzten] contain the contradiction insofar as
they are, in the same respect, negatively related to one another . . . and are indiffer-
ent to one another. (LII 77/441)
Whereas contrary conceptual determinations such as the positive and the negative
essentially presuppose one another, they actually tend to oppose one another, thus
contradicting themselves. Since such oppositions result from the external reflec-
tion that has dominated the history of philosophy, this (implicit) self-contradiction
only inhabits pure concepts insofar as they have actually be conceived by, say, Plato,
Leibniz, or Kant.48 Hegel would argue, however, that these philosophers relied on
a conceptual paradigm the nature of which cannot be adequately grasped by focus-
ing on their actual work. Because he seeks to comprehend the pure concepts that
emerged from this paradigm, throughout the Logic he largely abstracts from the
way individual philosophers contributed to the constitution of self-contradictory
pure concepts.
However, because the concept of the negative actually states that it is nothing without its con-
47
trary, it exhibits this internal contradiction much more clearly than the concept of the positive (LII
66/432).
Thus, Hegel refers to Leibniz’s concept of monad as a “defective reflection” because it implies that
48
a monad is at once determined and indifferent to any determination whatsoever (LII 413/714).
As we have seen, Hegel conceives of the concept of opposition, which contains
the positive and the negative as its contrary moments, as a particular determina-
tion of reflection. As such, it presupposes a particular conception of the very
relation between essence and appearance. Just as the positive and the negative,
essence and appearance constitute a unity, but they tend to present themselves as
independent of their contrary. Whence the emergence of ontological dualisms,
including Kant’s epistemological opposition between noumena and phenomena.
For Hegel, by contrast, the true essence of the concept essence itself consists in the
unity of essence and appearance:
It is of the greatest importance to understand and retain this nature of the reflective
determinations, namely, that their truth consists only in their relation to one another,
that therefore each in its very concept contains the other.49
However, the history of thought testifies to the incapacity of philosophy to affirm

the unity of contrary conceptual determinations. The Doctrine of Essence is precisely
concerned with those determinations of pure thought that remain, at least to some
extent, opposed to one another.50 By opposing such contrary determinations as
the positive and the negative, external reflection “alienates” both moments from
their essential unity, that is, from the concept as such which constitutes their
ultimate principle. Hegel’s speculative logic annuls this alienation, as it were, by
exposing the contradiction between, on the one hand, their essential unity and,
on the other hand, their prevailing opposition.
Thus, the concept of contradiction plays a twofold part in the Doctrine of Es-
sence.51 On the one hand, Hegel treats this concept as a particular determination
of reflection that has emerged in the history of thought and, as such, belongs to
the content of the Doctrine of Essence. On the other hand, he employs the concept
of contradiction to resolve the very opposition between essence and appearance,
laying bare their “common root.” This is, of course, the step which Kant did not
take—and could not have taken—when he, in the Critique of Pure Reason, estab-
lished the opposition between sensibility and thought, when he treated the vari-
ous conceptual oppositions produced by transcendental reflection, and when he
criticized the antinomies produced by pure reason. Clearly, Hegel considers the
method that might resolve such conceptual oppositions to involve the concept of
contradiction. His actual remarks on this concept, however, have given rise to quite
49
LII 73/438; cf. LI 131/122.
50
“[T]he world as it is in itself posits itself over against . . . the world of appearances. But that
which appears and that which is essential are nothing outside of their relation. . . . That which appears
manifests the essential, and the essential is insofar as it appears.—The relation is the still imperfect
union of reflection-into-otherness and reflection-into-self” (LII 125/480).
Actually, this also obtains of the concept of opposition and its contrary moments (cf. LII
51
562/835). Since Hegel does not dwell on the role of these concepts in his own account of the deter-
minations of reflection, I will focus on the concept of contradiction. I would like to note that Hegel’s
remarks on the concept of contradiction pertain to a different level than Kant’s treatment of the
concept “conflict” qua concept of reflection. From Hegel’s point of view, the very opposition between
contrary concepts such as “agreement” and “conflict” (an opposition Kant took for granted) testifies
to a contradiction that Kant ignores, namely, the contradiction between the unity of these contrary
conceptual determinations and their actual opposition. This latter meaning of the concept of contra-
diction is relevant to speculative philosophy alone.
a few misunderstandings. Before turning to the role of the concept of contradic-
tion in Hegel’s own method, I will first examine these remarks themselves.
8. the principle of self-contradiction

Hegel begins his remarks on the concept of contradiction by going along with
the language of dogmatic metaphysics, which he considers to have applied the
principles of traditional logic to things as such. This view clearly corresponds
to Kant’s criticism of Leibniz. In line with this metaphysics, Hegel presents the
concept of contradiction in the form of a proposition. Even more than the other
determinations of reflection, he notes,
the determination into which they pass as into their truth, namely, contradiction,
should be given the form of a principle; it should be said “that all things are in
themselves contradictory,” and this in the sense that this principle, unlike the others,
expresses rather . . . the essence of things. (LII 74/439)
To my knowledge, no commentators who quote this remarkable passage have

paid attention to the quotation marks, the conditional form of the sentence that
introduces it, or the larger context of Hegel’s account.52 In my view, Hegel here
ironically couches his conception of contradiction in the metaphysical language
he is intending to overcome.53 As we will see, Hegel indeed considers the concept
of contradiction to give rise to a particular philosophical principle. Yet this prin-
ciple has nothing to do with the classical principle of non-contradiction, which
was already discussed in the section devoted to the concept of identity. Unlike this
classical principle, it is concerned neither with the relation between subject and
predicate, nor with that between things and their properties. In order to mark
the difference between the classical principle of non-contradiction and Hegel’s
speculative principle of contradiction, I will refer to the latter as the principle of
self-contradiction.
Unlike the principle of non-contradiction, the principle of self-contradiction
does not concern a formal condition of the validity of judgments, but, as Hegel
puts it, rather expresses the essence of things. This means, I would like to suggest,
that it is concerned with the same ontological sphere as Kant’s transcendental
concepts of reflection, that is, with the very relation between essence and appear-
ance. Even the term ‘thing’ is therefore misleading here. As we have seen, Hegel
dismisses not only the propositional form in which the determinations of reflec-
tion are traditionally rendered, but also the subject—all things—to which they are
traditionally assigned. Since these classical principles “adopt being, or everything,
This is also the case with Miller’s translation of the Science of Logic. None of the commentaries I
52
have consulted questions the status of Hegel’s wording in this passage. Even though the edition of the
Gesammelte Werke does not actually use quotation marks, the whole sentence (so sollte . . . gesagt werden:)
makes it perfectly clear that the phrase functions as a quotation.
This is in agreement with the method of speculative science in general (see section 9). The
53
subtle irony of the passage at hand is typical of a number of similarly infamous remarks. Thus, Hegel
refers to the content of the Logic as follows: “It can therefore be said that this content is the exposi-
tion of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit” (LI 44/50;
cf. 79/78).
as their subject, they resuscitate being” (LII 37–38/410), which renders them
“unfitted for higher spheres and for the whole.”54
Thus, Hegel by no means wishes to reject the logical rules constitutive of em-
pirical judgments. On his view, the understanding is perfectly justified in avoiding
contradictions as long as it is involved in the production of empirical knowledge.55
If thought engages in purely philosophical reflection, by contrast, the classical
principle of non-contradiction turns out to be completely inadequate. For only
the speculative principle of self-contradiction allows thought to comprehend a
particular content, whatever its nature, as a process, more precisely, as the at-
tempt to resolve the contradiction between its essential principle and its actual
determination:
The contradiction . . . is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only insofar as
something contains a contradiction within itself that it moves, has an urge and activ-
ity. (LII 75/439)
In order to clarify the speculative meaning of the principle of self-contradiction,

Hegel then offers various examples drawn from the realm of common experience.
According to the second example, a living being is at once its inner principle and
the negation of this principle. Since an acorn is at once an acorn and a poten-
tial oak tree, it can be regarded as suffering from the contradiction between its
essence and its actual determination and, hence, as impelled to resolve its self-
contradiction (LII 76/440). Yet it is completely irrelevant, first, to regard ‘acorn’
and ‘oak tree’ as mutually exclusive predicates and, second, to ask whether or not
LI 386/325; cf. LII 561–62/834. These passages refute the wide-spread criticism of Hegel’s
54
alleged “ontologization” of the principle of contradiction mentioned above—at least insofar as “ontol-
ogy” is regarded as a set of claims about reality as such. I agree with Forster’s claim that Hegel “avoids
affirming contradictions of reality, because [he] does not use or recognize the validity of the concept
of reality” (M. Forster, “Hegel’s Dialectical Method,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. F. C.
Beiser [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 143–44).
See Düsing, Das Problem der Subjektivität, 97, and Longuenesse, Hegel’s Critique, 43. When Hegel
55
denounces representational thought for its “horror” of the contradiction, the context—a discussion of
the ontological proof of the existence of God—makes it clear that his criticism is exclusively directed
against former metaphysics (LII 78/442). In the Phenomenology, Hegel points out that even the most
basic form of empirical knowledge, perception, involves contradictions (Phen 83/70, 85/72, 87/75).
Insofar as consciousness relates to its object as to an individual thing with properties, it is unknowingly
torn between contradictory claims. Thus, consciousness attempts to define its object at once as self-
identical “one” and as an aggregate of many properties, it conceives of these properties themselves
as belonging exclusively to the thing it perceives and as general ideas, it considers this thing to be
independent of other things and as part of a whole, and to be both dependent on and independent
from itself qua observer. By making these implicit contradictions explicit, Hegel demonstrates that
this primitive relation of consciousness to its object cannot be sustained and, hence, must be resolved
(Phen 89/76). The pursuit of empirical knowledge is by no means impeded, I hold, by the implicit
contradictions on which this knowledge is based. The “steady everyday life and activity of perceptual
consciousness,” Hegel notes, “resists” comprehending the unity of such determinations as the one
and the many or universality and singularity (Phen 91/78–79). Hegel’s exposition of the contradictory
assumptions of perceptual consciousness exclusively serves the methodological purpose of moving
from one mode of thought to the next. Thus, the fact that the mode of consciousness Hegel calls
“perception” relies, as much as any finite mode of thought, on contradictory ontological assumptions,
does not imply that empirical knowledge should therefore not avoid such logical contradictions as
may occur at the level of explicit judgments concerning particular states of affairs.
they can simultaneously be attributed to the same thing. This example is echoed
in the following passage from the Lectures on the History of Philosophy:
The germ does not manifest anything. It has the urge to develop; it cannot bear
to be merely in itself. Its urge consists in the contradiction that it is merely in itself
and should not be so. The urge pushes [the germ] into existence. Much is brought
forth; but everything that is brought forth is already contained in the germ, albeit
not developed, but enveloped and ideal. (LHP I, 40–41/22)
Yet Hegel would not have gone such lengths merely to provide biology with the
means to comprehend its objects in a non-mechanistic way. The Lectures on the
History of Philosophy rather refer to the example of the germ to elucidate the
distinction between “being in itself” and “being for itself,” a distinction without
which a speculative comprehension of history—and, for that matter, of any devel-
opment—would be impossible.56 Thus, Hegel holds that world history from its very
beginning contains the principle of freedom, but in such a way that the actual,
one-sided determinations of this principle, achieved by the subsequent cultural
epochs, contradict the very essence of freedom until the epoch of modernity has
been reached.57 The same distinction governs the Phenomenology of Spirit and, in
various ways, Hegel’s oeuvre as a whole. It is only against this background, it seems
to me, that the following remark begins to make sense:
Speculative thought consists solely in holding on to the contradiction, and thus to
itself. Unlike representational thought, it does not let itself be dominated by the
contradiction, it does not allow the latter to dissolve its determinations into other
ones or into nothing. (LII 76/440–41)
If the principle of contradiction is conceived in this way, it can no longer be articu-

lated in the form of a proposition that assigns a predicate to “all things.” For even
though Hegel sometimes illustrates his method by referring to forms of movement
and development proper to things, his philosophy is pre-eminently concerned
with modes of thought, whether they appear in the form of consciousness, science,
spirit, or pure concepts.58 Even when Hegel refers to the contradiction inherent
in things, however, he always has in mind the asymmetrical contradiction between
that which something is in itself (the unity of its essence and appearance) and its
LHP I, 39/20–21; cf. LI 131/122. See S. S. Hahn, Contradiction in Motion: Hegel’s Organic Con-
56
cept of Life and Value (Ithaca, NY-London: Cornell University Press, 2007), for an account of Hegel’s
conception of contradiction in light of Goethe’s organic view of nature. Her approach differs from
mine in that she takes the contradiction Hegel attributes to organic forms of nature as the paradigm
case of what I have called the principle of self-contradiction.
Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte Band I: Die Vernunft in der Ge-
57
schichte, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1955), translated as Lectures on the Philosophy
of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975), 63–64/54–55; cf. LII 555/829.
With regard to the first point, Longuenesse, Hegel’s Critique, 70, also stresses that Hegel’s no-
58
tion of contradiction is not to be identified with the concrete examples he offers, examples taken
from the domain of representational thought. With regard to the second point, Hegel, according to
Longuenesse, conceives of all objects insofar as they are constituted by thought as exhibiting “the
contradiction of unity and multiplicity, of complete determination and unpredictable contingency”
(42; cf. 67, 81). Whereas this characterization seems to concern objects of scientific knowledge, I hold
that Hegel’s remarks on contradiction rather pertain to the pure concepts that, on his view, underlie
any such objects.
actual, one-sided determination (its appearance). Once again, this approach—
proper to speculative science—has nothing to do with the classical principle of
non-contradiction, that is, with the impossibility of attributing, at the same time
and in the same respect, contrary predicates to a single subject or thing.
By raising the principle of self-contradiction into the basic principle of his
method, in sum, Hegel can comprehend any particular mode of thought as torn
apart by the contradiction between, on the one hand, the unity of its contrary deter-
minations which it is in itself, and, on the other, the one-sided content to which it
has been reduced within the actual history of thought.59 Once Hegel has done this,
he merely has to observe—as he explains most clearly in the Phenomenology—how
such a mode of thought, suffering from this its internal contradiction, attempts
to incorporate the moment it had so far excluded from itself.60 By thus treating
pure concepts—and, by the same token, any mode of thought—as if they were
living beings, Hegel has brought about a philosophical revolution the importance
of which, in my opinion, equals the one initiated by Kant.
9. contradiction as negativity
As we have seen, Hegel regards the contradiction as “the root of all movement”
(LII 74–75/439). Now, both the Phenomenology and the Logic use similar terms to
characterize the concept of negativity. The Logic defines negativity as the “indwell-
ing pulsation of self-movement and vitality” (LII 78/442), and even states that
“the contradiction is the negative in its essential determination, the principle of
all self-movement.”61 Hegel likewise considers Kant’s account of the antinomies
to reveal the force of this negativity. And this despite the fact that Kant himself
merely used the antinomies to argue, in a skeptical vein, that thesis and antithesis
necessarily annul one another. If, by contrast, this result is
grasped in its positive aspect, [it] is nothing else but the inner negativity that consti-
tutes the self-moving soul of these determinations, and the principle of all natural
and spiritual life.62
Since Kant ignored the positive result of his criticism of speculative reason, his
philosophy, Hegel suggests, “let itself be dominated by the contradiction,” thus
Toward the end of the Logic, Hegel describes its very beginning—the concept of being—in
59
equally organic terms as his later lectures describe the germ that is pushed from within to develop.
Since the method of philosophy is “the immanent form” of the contents at stake, “the immediateness
of the beginning must be deficient in itself and must be endowed with the urge to carry itself further”
(LII 555/829).
Phen 65/54; cf. LI 72/73; Enc I, §23. Interestingly, Kant equally characterizes the method he
60
employs with regard to the antinomies as a mere observation of the conflict between contrary claims;
this skeptical method is not intended to take sides with one claim or the other (KrV A423/B451).
LII 76/440. Hegel also refers to the pure concept—that is, absolute negativity such as it occurs
61
within the realm of pure thought—as the “simple life-pulse” of pure thought (LI 27/37) and “the
inner self-movement of the content of the logic” (LI 49/53; cf. Phen 26/19).
LI 52/56; cf. LII 67/433, 563/835. Cf.: “Thus all the oppositions that are assumed as fixed,
62
as for example finite and infinite, individual and universal . . . are in and for themselves a transition;
the synthesis and the subject in which they appear is the product of their concept’s own reflection . . .
it is the concept . . . that keeps them steadily in view, moves them as their soul and brings out their
dialectic” (LII 560/833).
allowing the latter “to dissolve its determinations into other ones or into noth-
ing.”63 This criticism notwithstanding, Hegel clearly valued the general idea behind
Kant’s account of the antinomies.64 For Kant had at least traced back the various
conflicts between thesis and antithesis to philosophy’s incapacity adequately to
distinguish between phenomena and noumena, an incapacity he considered to in-
here in reason as such.65 However, this in itself does not explain why Hegel should
consider the metaphysical conflicts exposed by Kant to exhibit the “self-moving
soul” of pure concepts. Given the limits of this article a few remarks must suffice
to answer this question.
As we have seen, the Logic extricates pure concepts from propositions which
attribute them to substrates such as “all things” or “the world at large” so as to focus
on the content of these concepts themselves. Once Hegel has taken this step, he
can comprehend contrary determinations such as indivisibility and divisibility—
or any other pair of contrary pure concepts—as complementary moments of a
single conceptual perspective.66 Their unity can only be established, however, if
each of these contrary determinations proves to be one-sided, that is, proves to be
incapable of determining the whole (in the case of the antinomies, the world at
large).67 According to Hegel, Kant rightly, if unintentionally, demonstrated that
such contrary determinations as indivisibility and divisibility, applied to the world
at large, yield conflicts that dogmatic metaphysics could not resolve. Unlike Kant,
Hegel sometimes refers to such conflicts as contradictions.68 Yet I believe that in
this case he does not use the term in its proper, speculative sense. According to
the speculative meaning of the principle of contradiction, a conceptual determi-
nation such as indivisibility only contradicts its ultimate principle—the concept as
such—insofar as it opposes its contrary, that is, insofar as it does not establish the
unity of indivisibility and divisibility.
Throughout the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel seeks to exhibit the unity of contrary
determinations by highlighting their mutual dependence. Yet the term ‘unity’
involves more than the fact that concepts such as “indivisibility” and “divisibility”
presuppose one another. The term ‘unity’, as used by Hegel, always refers to an
asymmetrical form of mutual dependence. What this means is explained relatively
clearly in the discussion of the concepts “infinity” and “finitude” in the Doctrine of
Being, pure concepts that are used in the domains of mathematics and metaphysics
LII 76/440–41; cf. 67/433, 558/832; LI 49/54.

63
Cf. LI 52/56, 216/190; LII 558–60/831–33. The Logic discusses the first two antinomies at
64
length (LI 216–27/190–99, 271–76/234–38). Antinomies, Hegel here argues, do not result from
the inappropriate application of pure concepts, but belong to these concepts themselves: “the deter-
minations of thought must not be taken in their application to . . . the general idea of the world . . .
[but] must be considered purely on their own account, since they alone constitute the essence and
the ground of the antinomies” (LI 217/191).
Cf. KrV B449–50; FK 320/84.
65
“But profounder insight into the antinomical . . . nature of reason reveals that any concept
66
consists in a unity of contrary moments” (LI 217/191; cf. LII 79/442; Enc I, §48, §89, rem.; LHP III,
356/448).
For Hegel, the true resolution of the antinomies consists in the insight that “two opposed, one-
67
sided determinations which belong necessarily to one and the same concept cannot be valid each on
its own” (LI 218/191–92; my emphasis).
Cf. LI 39/46; LII 38/411, 217/191, 558/832.
68
alike. Put briefly, Hegel here states that each of these pure concepts contradicts
69
their inner unity, but that only the concept of infinity constitutes the true prin-
ciple of its contrary determinations. As such, it establishes the unity of infinity and
finitude by incorporating the concept of finitude. The concept of finitude, in its
turn, establishes this very unity by reducing itself to a moment of the concept of
infinity.70 Insofar as the concept of finitude resists this incorporation—and the
history of metaphysics testifies to this resistance—the one-sided concepts “infinity”
and “finitude” remain opposed to one another. For Hegel, however, this apparent
opposition hides the in-depth contradiction between that which the concept of
infinity truly is (the unity of its contrary determinations) and its actual appear-
ance (infinity as opposed to finitude). Unlike the conflicts between the contrary
metaphysical propositions exhibited by the antinomies, the conflicts exhibited in
the Logic pertain to the asymmetrical contradiction between a one-sided conceptual
determination and its true principle. Unlike symmetrical conflicts, this asymmetri-
cal self-contradiction does not resolve into nothing, but necessarily yields the unity
of contrary conceptual determinations implicit in each of them.
Kant, it might be argued, employed the classical distinction between essence
and appearance to separate the realm of noumena from the realm of phenomena.
This allowed him to block the route toward purely rational knowledge of things
in themselves. Hegel, for his part, applies the distinction between essence and ap-
pearance neither to the various faculties of the subject nor to the world at large,
but employs it to comprehend the totality of pure concepts themselves. On his view,
a concept such as finitude appears to be opposed to its contrary, but is essentially
a mere determination of the concept of infinity. Thus, Hegel regards each pure
concept as the effort to overcome the internal contradiction between what it is
in itself (the unity of its contrary determinations which it, qua concept, contains
within itself) and the way it has actually appeared in the history of thought (as a
one-sided determination implicitly or explicitly opposed to its contrary). As long
as pure concepts such as “infinity” and “finitude” are conceived as excluding their
contrary, thought finds itself entangled “in the irreconciled, unresolved, absolute
contradiction.”71 It is precisely in the Logic—and in the Logic alone—that such one-
sided concepts are impelled to resolve this inner contradiction. It is this perspec-
tive, I would like to suggest, that allows Hegel to reconstruct the totality of pure
concepts that have emerged in the history of science and philosophy.
Insofar as metaphysics used the concepts “infinity” and “finitude” to achieve a priori knowl-
69
edge of the world as such, for example, it produced the contrary claims denounced by Kant’s first
antinomy (KrV A426/B454–61). Contrary to Kant, Hegel seeks to resolve the clash between these
claims by arguing that both of them presuppose a conception of infinity too abstract to be suited for
philosophical purposes.
“[T]he unity of the infinite, which each of these moments itself is, is differently determined in
70
each of them. To that which is determined as infinite belongs the finitude that is distinguished from it;
whereas the infinite is this unity in itself, the finite is merely the determinateness or limit belonging
to it” (LI 159/145; my emphasis). The Doctrine of Essence maintains that the concept of infinity “is the
contradiction such as it manifests itself in the sphere of being” (LII 75/440). Even though this sphere
also contains determinations that reflect one another—such as infinity and finitude (LI 131/122)—they
pertain to qualitative and quantitative ways of determining given objects. Hegel elsewhere considers
the concepts of infinity and finitude to underlie Kant’s first antinomy (LI 109/103). See on this my
On Hegel, ch. 4.
LI 152–53/139–40.
71
According to Hegel, the classical principle of non-contradiction and Kant’s
philosophical notion of conflict merely allow philosophy to expose the mutual
annulment of contrary claims. In his view, only the speculative principle of self-
contradiction allows philosophy truly to resolve such conflicts as divide any mode
of thought against itself.72 The principle of self-contradiction does this, I have
argued, by exposing the asymmetrical contradiction between the unity that a
concept is in itself and its actual negation of this unity. Whereas, in other words,
the external mode of reflection which has prevailed in the history of thought has
“negated” only the initial unity of contrary conceptual determinations, the Logic
allows pure concepts to negate this first negation as well. This latter negativity,
Hegel notes toward the end of the Logic, constitutes
the innermost source of all activity, of all animate and spiritual movement, the dia-
lectical soul that everything true possesses and through which alone it is true. . . .
[T]he negative of the negative . . . is this resolution [Aufhebung] of the contradiction.
(LII 563/835–36)
While discussing the classical concept of contradiction, Hegel, we have seen, takes
the opportunity to allude to its role in speculative science itself, thus anticipating
his discussion of the speculative method at the end of the Logic.73 Although the
concept of contradiction such as it has surfaced in the history of thought “con-
tains” the speculative meaning Hegel attributes to it, its common usage does not
explicitly expose this meaning. For this reason, Hegel more frequently uses the
concept of negativity to refer to the principle of speculative science.
Insofar as the concept of contradiction has been conceived as a particular mode
of the concept of opposition, as traditionally has been done, it remains opposed
to the concept of identity (LII 38/411). In this form it does not allow thought
to grasp the unity of contrary determinations, but merely to annul contradictory
claims about empirical objects or the world at large. That is why the Doctrine of
Essence treats the concept of contradiction on a par with the other finite determi-
nations of reflection. Because the content that the concept of contradiction has
actually posited is at odds with the concept as such, it cannot but give way—within
the element of pure thought created by the Logic—to a less one-sided determina-
tion of the relation between essence and appearance, that is, to the concept of
ground (LII 69–70/435).
Cf. LHP III, 359/451.

72
See Düsing, Das Problem der Subjektivität, 319. Düsing argues that the determinations of reflection
73
(identity, opposition, contradiction, and ground) treated in the Doctrine of Essence run parallel to the
“phases” of Hegel’s own method. In his view, the final chapter of the Logic relies on these determina-
tions to prove the necessary nature of this method. It seems to me, however, that Düsing plays down
the multi-layered nature of the Doctrine of Essence. Thus, the abstract concept of identity Hegel discusses
in the context of the Doctrine of Essence cannot be identified with the concept of unity that allows him
to highlight the unity of contrary conceptual determinations. As I see it, all concepts treated in the
Logic contain the concept as such—that is, the unity of contrary determinations—as their ultimate
principle and, hence, express particular aspects of this principle. Since Hegel’s method exclusively
relies on this very principle, the justification of the speculative method by no means depends on the
concepts actually treated in the Doctrine of Essence. See also Henrich, “Hegels Logik der Reflexion,”
150–53. Like Düsing, Henrich maintains that Hegel’s account of the determinations of reflection is
intended to make explicit the method already at work in the Doctrine of Being.
Now if Hegel’s elusive remarks on the principle of self-contradiction pertain
to his own method, then it should be possible to trace the role of this principle in
Hegel’s account of the determinations of reflection themselves.74 The next and
last step of this essay therefore consists in a brief reflection on the method Hegel
employs in this text.
10. the principle of self-contradiction

in hegel’s method
For reasons discussed below, it is quite difficult to identify the principle of self-
contradiction in Hegel’s actual treatment of the determinations of reflection. Since
the role of this principle emerges relatively clearly in his account of the concepts
of identity and distinctness, I will focus on this section. External reflection itself,
Hegel here notes, admits that “the principle of identity merely expresses a one-
sided determination” (LII 41–42/414). This insight implies, he holds, that the
truth of this determination consists in the unity of identity and distinctness (LII
42/414). For when external reflection grants that the principle of identity is one-
sided, it implicitly assumes the unity of identity and distinctness as the criterion
of its criticism. Yet instead of actually positing this unity, external reflection main-
tains that identity and distinctness are absolutely distinct. It thus gets entangled
in “conflicting claims” (LII 42/414). External reflection itself is not aware of the
contradiction between the content it ultimately presupposes and the content it
has actually posited—this contradiction has not become “for it”:
Although the content of representational thought [das Vorstellen] is in each case the
contradiction, it does not become aware of the latter; it remains external reflec-
tion.75
The ultimate content of external reflection is constituted by the determinations of

reflection as a whole, that is, by the ways in which thought has traditionally defined
the relation between essence and appearance. In order to expose the contradic-
tion that these determinations contain within themselves, Hegel, I argued above,
often abstracts from the perspective of external reflection and, moreover, from
its predominance in the history of thought. Thus, he maintains, albeit rather
obliquely, that the “determinations of essence” are “contradictory in themselves”
(LII 68/434). This means that the concept of identity, such as it has emerged
in the history of thought, for instance, simultaneously presupposes the unity of
identity and difference and actually excludes its contrary from itself.76 Once the
Evidently, I will not be able to consider other parts of Hegel’s work in light of the principle of
74
self-contradiction presented in this article. However, the following passages from the Doctrine of the
Concept and the Phenomenology confirm that this principle is not so much concerned with opposite
predicates that are simultaneously assigned to the same subject as with the contradiction between
what something essentially is and the way it actually appears: “The chemical object . . . is thus the con-
tradiction of its positedness and its immanent individual concept” (LII 431/728); “Self-consciousness
discovers . . . the contradiction between, on the one hand, its knowledge of the ethical nature of its
own action and, on the other, that which is ethical in and for itself, thus finding its own downfall”
(Phen 291–92/266; cf. 360–61/333).
LII 77/441; cf. 562/835.
75
According to Hegel, a concept such as “limit,” discussed in the Doctrine of Being, exhibits the
76
same contradiction: on the one hand, this concept presupposes the unity of “something” and “other,”
concept of identity—and, for that matter, any pure concept—is regarded from a
speculative point of view, it is pushed from within to resolve its self-contradiction,
and this until a concept emerges that is no longer at odds with the principle of
speculative thought as such.
However, Hegel’s actual treatment of the determinations of reflection hardly
refers to their effort at resolving inner contradictions. As I see it, there are at least
three reasons for Hegel’s reticence in this respect. First, the context of the Doctrine
of Essence does not yet allow him to elaborate on his speculative method in any
systematic way. When he, at the end of the Logic, actually does address his method,
he confines himself to a very abstract description. Hegel here repeats, however,
that speculative thought essentially consists in “thinking the contradiction” (LII
563/835). Contradictions emerge, he notes, wherever contrary determinations
are brought together “in one relation” and, as such, have actually become pres-
ent for thought (LII 562/835). The dialectical treatment of a determination
opposed to its contrary then consists in “positing the unity that is contained in
it” (LII 562/835), thus “resolving” its contradiction.77 Although these passages
confirm my reading of the chapter devoted to the determinations of reflection,
they are much too general to shed light on Hegel’s actual, multi-layered account
of particular concepts.78
Hegel’s understanding of the concept of contradiction is also difficult to grasp,
second, because he sometimes uses the term ‘contradiction’ in a rather loose
sense. As was noted above, he does not hesitate to refer to conflicts between con-
trary, yet equally valid claims—including Kant’s antinomies of pure reason—as
contradictions.79 Such references obscure the fact that his speculative principle of
self-contradiction is exclusively concerned with the asymmetrical conflict between
the content a concept contains and the limited content it has actually posited.
Finally, throughout the Logic, Hegel often adopts a mode of reasoning remi-
niscent of ancient skepticism. This element of his method aims to show that a
particular position presupposes its contrary and, if pushed to its limits, is over-
turned into the latter. As I see it, Hegel employs this classical way of exhibiting
contradictions in order to fight external reflection by means of its proper weapons.
It is completely in agreement with the method outlined in the Phenomenology that
Hegel should speak the language of the mode of thought he aims to criticize.
This negative element of speculative dialectics, the arguments of which are often
far from convincing, is clearly intended to annul the initial dogmas of external
on the other hand, it posits these moments as existing independently of one another (LI 136/126).
See on this P. Guyer, “Hegel, Leibniz und der Widerspruch im Endlichen,” in Seminar, ed. R.-P. Horst-
mann, 230–60, at 255.
LII 563/835; cf. LI 49/54.
77
This is also emphasized by Henrich, “Hegels Logik der Reflexion,” 100–05.

78
Thus, Hegel maintains at the beginning of his treatment of the determinations of reflection that
79
the various principles of traditional logic contradict one another (LII 38/411; cf. Enc I, §119, rem.). In
a Kantian vein, he here suggests that each principle claims absolute truth and nevertheless is opposed
to a contrary principle. Hegel notes in the Logic that the determinations of the understanding are in
conflict with themselves (LI 39/46), but equally that the finite and the infinite are in conflict with one
another (LI 40/47). However, in the latter passage, he once again goes along with Kant’s approach to
conflicts, albeit to criticize it.
reflection. Although this element may be a first, primitive way of highlighting
80
the mutual dependence of conceptual determinations, it seems to me that it tends

to conceal the proper, positive thrust of Hegel’s method.81 This positive thrust, I
have argued, consists in letting a concept resolve the contradiction between what
it is in itself and the way it has actually manifested itself. Throughout the Logic,
this element of Hegel’s method largely occurs behind the back, so to speak, of
the finite modes of pure thought addressed in this work.
11. conclusion
I have argued that Hegel’s Logic reconstructs the totality of pure concepts that
have emerged in the history of thought by interpreting each of these concepts
as contradicting the unity of its contrary determinations, a unity they contain
within themselves. I have wished to demonstrate that Hegel’s principle of self-
contradiction, unlike its classical counterpart, is exclusively concerned with the
asymmetrical conflict between the true content of a pure concept (the unity of its
contrary determinations) and its actual appearance (the abstract determination
it has posited as its true principle). Precisely because this contradiction is asym-
metrical, its resolution does not consist in the annulment of its contrary moments,
but in a concept that has actually posited the unity it always already contained.
It is to this asymmetry, I would contend, that Hegel’s dialectical method owes it
tremendous force. As I noted above, the actual text of the Logic often conceals the
principle of self-contradiction behind a tangle of dialectical arguments. Although
these arguments may seem an easy target, I hold that their refutation does not
infringe upon the principle of self-contradiction itself which, cunningly, awaits us
at the end without so much as a single scar.82
In some cases it is even hard to decide whether Hegel expects the reader to take seriously this
80
skeptical—or quasi-skeptical—line of reasoning. Thus, he argues that the understanding, when stating
that the concept of identity is different from the concept of difference, implicitly admits that the very
nature of the concept of identity consists in “being different” and, hence, that it contains its contrary
(LII 41/413). Hegel here collapses the distinction between such concepts as are treated as contents
and such concepts as are used—in this case by the understanding—to reflect on them. See Becker,
Begriff der Dialektik, 25–34; Düsing, Das Problem der Subjektivität, 219. Both authors take their—justified—
criticism of these and similar passages to compromise the core of Hegel’s dialectic.
From his 1802 treatise on skepticism onward, Hegel repeatedly refers to the role of skepticism in
81
his speculative method. The Encyclopedia notes that true philosophy contains skepticism as its dialectical
moment (Enc I, §81, add. 2; cf. §81, rem.; Phen 61/50; LII 558–59/831–32). This moment is concerned
with the overturning of a finite determination into its contrary (Enc I, §81). As such, it constitutes the
negative moment of the process in which the opposition between contrary determinations is posited
and resolved. The Encyclopedia uses the term ‘dialectical’ for the negative moment of this resolution
alone and refers to its positive outcome as the ‘speculative’ moment of logic (Enc I, §§79, 81–82). The
Logic, on the other hand, identifies this speculative moment with the positive meaning of dialectics
itself (LI 52/56; cf. LII 557–60/830–33).
Cf. Phen 440/407. I would like to thank Robert Stern, Diogo Ferrer, and my colleagues in
82
Groningen for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. Thanks are also due to the
anonymous referees of this journal for their criticisms of an earlier draft.

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Hegel's Account of Contradiction in the Science of Logic Reconsidered

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 48, Number 3, July 2010,

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 (1978): 301–12, at 309.

Karin de Boer is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 48, no. 3 (2010) 345–373

Influential non-metaphysical readings of Hegel’s Logic include K. Hartmann, “Hegel: A Non-

2. kant’s account of the concepts of reflection

3. hegel’s doctrine of essence

4. hegel’s conception of the determinations

5. the concept of identity

predicates. Ultimately, however, he conceives of these “subjects” as particular determinations of the

6. the concept of opposition

7. the concept of contradiction

However, the history of thought testifies to the incapacity of philosophy to affirm

8. the principle of self-contradiction

To my knowledge, no commentators who quote this remarkable passage have

In order to clarify the speculative meaning of the principle of self-contradiction,

If the principle of contradiction is conceived in this way, it can no longer be articu-

LII 76/440–41; cf. 67/433, 558/832; LI 49/54.

Cf. LHP III, 359/451.

10. the principle of self-contradiction

The ultimate content of external reflection is constituted by the determinations of

This is also emphasized by Henrich, “Hegels Logik der Reflexion,” 100–05.

the mutual dependence of conceptual determinations, it seems to me that it tends

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