Beyond Concepts
This paper will show that Hegel’s philosophy of difference is actually a philosophy of Sameness, and Deleuze provides an actual philosophy of difference. Hegel represents a turning point in philosophy for two reasons: 1) he states a method of progressive, contradiction with his dialectic, and 2) he states that differences (or contradictions) in things are necessary for the formulation of concepts. This essay will explain Hegel’s dialectic method and then, proceed to explain his understanding of the Concept and its inherent relation to difference as opposition or contradiction. Then, Deleuze will be introduced who will posit that Ideas, not concepts, should be used to describe what he calls “the multiplicity of intuition.” Deleuze will present a form of difference which is not based on opposition but is instead a fundamental condition for ontology. Finally, a critique of Hegel’s philosophy from the point of view of Deleuzian thought will be presented showing that Hegel is not actually a philosopher of difference, but a philosopher of Sameness, and Deleuze has a better grasp on the Idea of difference.
Hegel and Difference
Any discussion of Hegel must begin with what he is most famous for: his dialectic. While the method of dialectical philosophy has existed at least since Socrates, Hegel was the first to radicalize it by affirming the negative in the dialectic in order to create a new concept. It is the basic thesis, antithesis, synthesis (though Hegel never used these terms). A starting thesis is compared to its contradictory antithesis, which creates a synthesis. When a thesis is combined with its antithesis, it is determined or mediated by a negation. Hegel calls this process sublimation. Sublimation comes from the German word Aufhebung, which means to rise up and rescue or preserve and to destroy or abolish. Hegel uses the word in both senses concurrently. When a thing is sublimated with its opposite, its essential parts are preserved and given ground (grund) while it’s accidental parts are abolished. Hegel’s concept of sublimation is the most important term in understanding his philosophy of difference because it affirms both identity and difference.
While the methodology of the dialectic was invented before the formation of traditional logic, Medieval Scholasticism unified the method of dialectic with logic intrinsically. Hegel goes beyond the Scholastic tradition. Traditional logic is a movement from something known to something unknown while preserving the truth. Traditional logic is considered the science of truth; it is considered necessary for any epistemological endeavor. Hegel attempts to flip philosophy on its head by stating that logic is not only the science of truth, but of metaphysics. Hegel is looking in this process for a logic which gives binding ontological rules to reality; he proposes one can find a logic that governs reality. These rules are binding regardless if anything exists at all. In his work The Science of Logic, Hegel separates logic into the Objective Logic and the Subjective Logic. The former deals with the doctrine of Being and the doctrine of Essence; the latter deals with the doctrine of the Concept; the former is the genesis of the latter.
In the “Objective Logic”, Hegel explains what Being and Essence are, and how they are synthesized into the concept. Being is the immediate, causal, passive substance. It is not posited and cannot posit itself. It simply is in all its immediacy. Being is the in-itself and is effected on. Essence is the ‘thisness’ or haecceites of a being. Aristotle used the Greek word to ti ên einai, or literally “the what it was to be”, to define essence. “Essence is the first negation of being, which has thereby become reflective shine” (Hegel 526). Essence determines being by positing what it is not. To determine something is literally to de-limit it or point out its boundaries. “Positedness [or to posit something] is determinate existence and differentiation” (Hegel 526) Essence is active substance. For instance, Jack’s essence is human, therefore Jack is human. However, Jack is not human until reflection posits him as such by differentiating him from all other humans; in the essence ‘human’ lies all necessities for what a human is. Also, no human is the negative of Jack; humanity is the negative of Jack because humanity contains both the identity with Jack and the difference of other humans who are not-Jack. It is the differences which make Jack ‘the what he was to be’, i.e. human. While Jill is also a human, she is not the same human as Jack yet they both carry the same qualities of ‘humaness’. Their individual gender is merely an accidental property or a dependent idea which depends on something else to exist. All being is Nature and is immediate, indeterminate, and passive. The capacity of humans to reason is a mid-point in Nature. The term other than Nature is Spirit; Spirit reflects Nature. The reflection posits the essence of being and gives it negativity. The reflection is active and affects being, mediating it into something new. Active and passive substances are identical and opposite. Identical in that ‘All Jacks are human’, opposite in that only ‘Some humans are Jacks’. The synthesis of being and essence engenders a new term: becoming. “The dialectical movement of substance through causality and reciprocal affection is thus the immediate genesis of the concept by virtue of which its becoming is displayed” (Hegel 509). Concept is the synthesized form of being and essence; being and essence are the becoming of the concept, but the concept is their foundation and truth. “Substance is implicitly what the concept is explicitly” (Hegel 509). Concepts for Hegel are that which one discovers in thought and expresses binding ontological rules; these rules are binding regardless if anything exists at all; they are the truth of reality.
This is the extent to which Hegel’s objective logic reaches. The concept has been reached as the end result of the objective logic. So is Hegel finished? Of course not. Hegel then begins with his subjective logic. As was stated above, being-in-itself cannot be posited as for-itself until Spirit has reflected on it. Spirit is self-consciousness as such (beyond even man) and is the grund of the concrete. Whatever comes before Spirit is subjective because it appears before the “I”. Not any individual “I” but the “I” of the Spirit. “The ‘I’ is the pure concept itself, the concept that has come into determinate existence” (Hegel 514). The concept is both identity and difference. The concept is identity in that it is a purely self-referring unity by abstracting from all determinateness (Hegel 514). The concept is difference in that it is a self-referring negativity, an absolute determinateness which stands opposed to anything other and reveals its individual personality (Hegel 514). The concept, therefore, subsumes reality through its universality which is immediately determinate.
The concept is at first pure or universal. “The pure concept is the absolutely infinite, unconditioned, and free” (Hegel 530). It is self-identifying and determines itself immediately. It does contain difference and determinateness but this is in the form of an in-itself (because it is pure self-reference) and therefore is not posited. It contains absolute mediation but is not mediated; this means it contains the potentiality to be absolutely mediated but is not actually mediated. The universal is like the fertilized ovum. It contains all the potentiality to become a multi-cellular living being but has not actualized this potential yet. The universal as identity or self-referring unity is the totality of the concept.
When the universal determines itself, it does so by a creative power (because the concept is self-referring absolute negativity) and thus becomes a particular concept. The particular is the differentiation within a universal. It is subsumed under the universal and is itself the universal in that it refers back to it through the universal’s determinations. A genus would be a universal while the particular would be the species (though not yet individuated). Human, platypus, and dolphin are all species of the genus animal. All of the differences between these species are internal in the genus. Any external differences between two things are diversities; these are contained in separate genera, for instance, man and table. Though the particular shares identity with the universal, it shares difference with other particulars, and it is by these differences that they are all equally universal.
Through the sublimation of the universal by the particular, the singular is created. The singularity is the positing of all the differences contained in the universal and determined through the particular. By becoming singular, the concept loses its abstraction. “Through singularity, where it is internal to itself, the concept becomes external to itself and steps into actuality” (Hegel 548). The singular is the positing of all differentiation contained in the concept. It is the ideal moment of being, where existence is given concrete meaning. Through the singular, the concept determines reality.
The difference of reality is contained within the concept. Without difference, everything would be the same. The concept grants meaning to the concrete through differentiation. For Hegel, this difference can only be found through a negative analysis of the identity of being. All the differences are contained initially in the unified identity, and through a revelation of determination, differences are discovered.
Deleuze and Difference
Gilles Deleuze views difference as inherently linked to Ideas, not concepts. For Deleuze, Ideas are the differentials of thought. He describes the world as a continuous series of multiplicity, and Ideas are the ‘images’ of this multiplicity. “Ideas are multiplicities: every idea is a multiplicity or a variety” (Deleuze 182). Multiplicity is the substance of the world. Multiplicity cannot be described in a universal, complete fashion. It is continually changing and fully perspectival. “Even the many is a multiplicity; even the one is a multiplicity” [emphasis added](Deleuze, 182). Any kind of totalizing description of multiplicity is impossible. The only way to describe multiplicity is through the image of Ideas. “Everything is a multiplicity in so far as it incarnates an Idea” (Deleuze 182). So the question becomes, what is an Idea? Ideas are n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicities (Deleuze 182). Dimensions are the variables which a phenomena depends on, e.g., a chair is in a room, right-side up, to the left of the desk, and above the floor. Continuity is all the relations between the changes of the dimension’s variables, i.e., the chair was upside down and to the right of the desk. The definition means the parts reciprocally determined by these relations. An Idea is first and foremost undetermined with regard to its object (multiplicity). This gives the Idea the maximum ability to represent objects of experience with a unity and allows perception to be effectively determined within a horizon. An Idea is determinable – or has a possibility of determination – with regard to objects of experience. This determinability allows the object of experience to reciprocally determine the Idea in order to conform with experience. This reciprocal determination allows the Idea to bear a complete determination with regards to concepts of the understanding. Concepts are not completely forgotten by Deleuze, they just no longer are the truth of concrete reality as they are for Hegel. For Deleuze, concepts are similar to mathematical functions. Concepts emerge out of a problematic (multiplicity) and cease to exist once the problematic is solved.
Ideas image multiplicity through a play of difference. Difference is pure power and affects how phenomena is imaged. “Power is the reciprocal determination according to which variable magnitudes are taken to be functions of one another” (Deleuze 174). Through reciprocal determination, difference creates relations in order for a complete determination to assign values to the elements of the multiplicity. “In effect, the reciprocity of determination does not signify a regression … but a veritable progression in which the reciprocal terms must be secured step by step, and the relations themselves established between them” (Deleuze 210). Complete determination engenders a form for phenomena represented by singular points. A single point, however, does not accurately image multiplicity. Multiple points are required to access the multiplicity. When one moves from one point to another, difference is revealed, e.g., moving from one to two reveals the continuity of multiplicity. Each point is merely a border (Deleuze refers to cuts or borders as nodes), and the look beyond the border is the difference between two borders. In this, one sees that all multiplicity is nothing but difference. “Instead of the enormous opposition between the one and the many, there is only the variety of multiplicity – in other words, difference” (Deleuze 182). Deleuze wishes to show that there is no inherent contradiction within difference, because everything contains difference in that everything is multiplicity.
Ideas are problematic and problems are Ideas (Deleuze 168). Concurrently, problems belong on the side of events, affections, or accidents, all of which are impermanent unlike essences. “The domain of Ideas is that of the inessential” (Deleuze 187). If Ideas were tied to permanence, they could never image the multiplicity (which is pure difference) in continuity. There are two kinds of events: real and ideal. Real events are solutions to problems; ideal events are the presuppositions of problems. All Ideas, therefore, are both real and ideal, and the ideal has a double property of transcendence and immanence in relation to the real (Deleuze 189). When real events appear, they reciprocally determine the ideal event so that it corrects itself in order to completely determine concepts which accord to multiplicity. Nature (i.e., multiplicity) is an harmonious discord of difference in which ideas continually and reciprocally determine each other. In a sense, Ideas constantly overcome each other in order to image multiplicity. The ideal event of an Idea refers to an Idea’s virtual content, while the real event of an Idea refers to an Idea’s actual content. By virtual, Deleuze does not mean unreal content, but non-actualized content (for the virtual is itself real). The virtual content is by now a complete determination (though further reciprocal determinations within the Idea can change it), but forms only a part of multiplicity. For virtual content to become actual content it must be differenciated. Differenciation is the process by which the singular points of multiplicity are localized and a solution emerges. Differenciation continually actualizes each solution with other solutions to form a global solution. This process does not create a unified whole though, because differenciation can only occur as space and time continually unfold which unravels multiplicity. In this, difference is never lost for a unifying whole.
A Deleuzian Response to Hegel
The main differences between Hegel and Deleuze are their definitions of difference and where they place the genesis of difference in relation to the world. For Hegel, difference is the positing of negatives which do not accord with an identity, but still are apart of the universal. He places the genesis of difference as a mere derivative of identity. Deleuze finds these answers to be incorrect. Difference is not a negative but a positive of reality. Difference is all there is. To refer to difference as a negative is to distort the problematic nature of Ideas. “The negative is an illusion, no more than a shadow of problems” (Deleuze 202). Negatives only appear through re-presentations. A re-presentation is a copy of a presentation and a standing in of something. It is an image of the past which has not been differenciated by spacial-temporal factors. A re-presentation is a unity, and unity can never present a multiplicity. Ideas, on the other hand, are always differential and always deal with multiplicity. The negative is also “the objective field of the false problem, the fetish in person” (Deleuze 208). One fetishes the re-presentation of the world to the point at which difference can only be viewed as a negative of identity. Through this lens, the continuity of the multiplicity is lost and everything is viewed as teleologically determined.
Hegel views the world as teleologically determined with a clear end. Hegel is the culmination of Rationalist thought starting with Descartes. “Rationalism wanted to tie the fate of Ideas to abstract and dead essences” (Deleuze 188). Essences are already determined, allow no room for change, and are not spatio-temporal. Differenciation though requires spatial-temporal dynamisms. Spatio-temporal is lived experience. “It is the dynamic processes which determine the actualization of Ideas” (Deleuze 216). Time means creative actualization. If being is determined by non-temporal essences, as Hegel would say, it could never achieve actualization through the concept because it lacks all sense of temporality.
In conclusion, as much as Hegel talks about difference, he still only views it as a negative form of identity. This presents false problems which (for him) can only be solved by contradictions based on higher unities until one reaches the Absolute which is itself only a unified identity which expresses nothing. Deleuze presents philosophy with a positive version of difference where not only is difference not a derivative of identity, difference is itself prior to identity. Since reality has become a multiplicity of difference, philosophy must learn to affirm the play of forces which is descriptive of difference.
Works Cited:
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich. The Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
