III.i. The metaphysical reading: self-consciousness as the manifestation of the concept

The metaphysical readings worry that Hegel’s praise of Kant’s account of apperception gives pretext to an overly Kantian and hence subjective interpretation of Hegel’s conception of the Concept. This worry latches onto Hegel’s own assertion that ‘[t]he concept, when it has progressed to a concrete existence which is itself free, is none other than the “I” or pure self-consciousness’ (GW12: 17). In light of this passage, proponents of the metaphysical interpretation, such as Houlgate (Reference Houlgate2006), Bowman (Reference Bowman2013), and Tolley (Reference Tolley2018) criticize ‘an “apperception”-oriented interpretation of Hegel’s logic’ (Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 143), especially singling out Pippin’s Kantian interpretation (1989), for too swiftly identifying Hegel’s notion of the Concept with Kant’s idea of self-consciousness (cf. Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006: 139; Martin Reference Martin2012: 203–204; Bowman Reference Bowman2013: 37–38, 108–11; Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 143–44). All advocates of the metaphysical interpretation rather insist on reading the quoted passage as advancing a manifestation view according to which the Concept is an onto-logical form which is manifested in a particular thinking subject (cf. GW12: 17, 19, 20). These onto-logical structures are said to be ‘not the operations of self-conscious reflecting and conceiving’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006: 139, cf. 2006: 130, 139–40; cf. GW12: 20). In this vein, Tolley (Reference Tolley2018: 163–64) purports that Hegel is using Kant’s apperception as a mere heuristic tool for introducing his notion of the Concept.

This metaphysical reading is motivated and seemingly underwritten by the fact that Hegel repeatedly puts forward the charge of subjectivism or psychologism against Kant’s account of apperception (cf. Bowman Reference Bowman2013: 106–13; Tolley Reference Tolley2018: in particular 164; cf. also Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006: 123–37). Furthermore, the Concept must be such an onto-logical structure for otherwise Hegel would not be able to ‘accommodate an essentially Schellingian philosophy of nature seeking to derive the relation-to-self that is self-consciousness from an initially unconscious realm of physics’ (Bowman Reference Bowman2013: 38; cf. also Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 166; cf. GW12: 20). On Tolley’s theological reading, we are urged to take seriously Hegel’s claim that logic is the science of God (2018: 146–48) and to see it as an indication that the thought at issue has to be understood not in terms of ‘finite human subjects’ but in terms of the ‘infinite divine subject’ and that the logical form investigated is the ‘divine creative-productive form’ (2018: 166).

The metaphysical reading thus tends to reify Hegel’s Concept, by identifying it with an onto-logical structure which is independent of our act of thinking or even with a divine self-thinking nous as propounded by Anaxagoras (cf. GW21: 34) and Aristotle (cf. GW20: 572) to which Hegel eludes. In consequence, the way in which the Concept, namely the principle and subject matter of speculative logic, is known must be in virtue of intellectual intuition which merely reenacts the logical movement of the thought-contents. On this view, Hegel’s notion of pure thought is to be understood as a non-sensible intuition of intellectual contents or thoughts which are independent of being thought or intuited (cf. Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006: e.g. 125–27; Koch Reference Koch2000: e.g. 145; cf. also Koch Reference Koch2019). Therefore, Hegel attributes precisely an intuitive understanding to us which Kant deprived us off (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006: 16–18, 128–29; cf. also Martin Reference Martin2012: 205; Kang Reference Kang2016). Moreover, Hegel’s notion of absolute negativity, which he invokes to explain the logical movement of pure content, is considered to be nothing other than the onto-logical form in which Hegel’s Concept consists. As I see it, Bowman (Reference Bowman2013: 48–54), Koch (Reference Koch1999: especially 18–23), Houlgate (Reference Houlgate, Houlgate and Baur2011: especially 142–45), and Martin (Reference Martin2012: 37–54) are all taking to heart Henrich’s interpretation (1976, 1978, 2003, 2010), which considers Hegel’s notion of self-negation as the key principle to his speculative logic.

In sum, the metaphysical reading fixates on Hegel’s subjectivism charge. Although this reading accommodates Hegel’s positive assessment of Kant’s apperception by viewing self-consciousness as a manifestation of the Concept, it contends, contrary to the Kantian readers, that the Concept cannot be properly understood in virtue of Kant’s account of apperception since this onto-logical form rather needs to be spelled out in terms of absolute negativity.

In what follows, I will aim to dispel the worry that reading Hegel’s conception of the Concept through the lens of Kant’s account of apperception makes it too subjective. I will clarify the sense in which pure self-consciousness is the principle and element of speculative logic such that Hegel’s positive evaluation of apperception can only be accommodated by viewing self-consciousness as a manifestation of the Concept.

III.ii. Two senses of self-consciousness: empirical and particular versus pure and universal self-consciousness

To begin with, I shall rehearse that Hegel characterizes the principle and subject matter of speculative logic in terms of rejecting the opposition of consciousness so that it consists in pure knowledge which is the identity of the object (being) and the concept (thinking) (GW21: 33, 45). Pure knowledge is pure thinking which consists in thinking only thinking itself, i.e. thinking neither this or that object nor this or that concept but to think the Concept, i.e. the concept is its own object and the object is its own concept.Footnote ⁵ In other words, pure thinking is the self-determination of the Concept.

But the worry might arise that this reading is too psychologistic and subjectivistic to account for the principle and content of Hegel’s logic. Hegel himself poses the question of whether speculative logic can begin with self-consciousness or the ‘I’. Hegel will point out that answering this question will depend on what one means by the term ‘self-consciousness’ and considers it as unsuited due to its ambiguity:

In this passage, Hegel distinguishes between a familiar or ordinary and concrete sense and a pure and abstract sense of the word ‘self-consciousness’. According to the first sense, self-consciousness means what Hegel also calls self-certainty (cf. GW21: 28; GW9: 103–104), which is the empirical self-consciousness which is individual and immediate, whereas the second sense refers to pure self-consciousness which is universal and mediated by an act of ‘pure abstraction’ (GW20: 118, §78R; cf. GW21: 56). Only the latter sense of self-consciousness is also identified by Hegel with pure knowledge in which there is no opposition of consciousness (cf. Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2019: 82). Note that Hegel’s distinction between empirical and pure self-consciousness does not line up with the one Kant draws between empirical and pure apperception (cf. B132, B153–56; AA7: 135, footnote), because the former is the inner sense, whereas for Hegel self-certainty is not sense certainty but the self-consciousness of myself as thinking subject.

With this distinction in mind, Hegel can diagnose that the supposed advantage of beginning speculative logic with the ‘I’ trades on confusing the familiar, individual self-consciousness with the unfamiliar, pure self-consciousness to which one must ascend through the decision to think only thinking itself, which is precisely a demand which must appear arbitrary and alien to the individual subject.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, this distinction also helps to shed light on the famous passage about the ‘I’ as the existing concept. For in that context, Hegel remarks that he expounds the concept by appealing to self-consciousness precisely because he supposes ‘when we think of […] the nature of the “I”, that we are referring to something familiar, that is, a commonplace of ordinary thinking’ (GW12: 17; my emphasis). But this shows that in fact this passage does not conflict with identifying the Concept with the unfamiliar, pure self-consciousness.

IV.i. Two senses of the universality of pure self-consciousness

To get a clearer picture of how Hegel understands the universality of pure self-consciousness, it is helpful to draw on other passages:

In this text, Hegel makes clear that pure thinking is universal in two respects. First, pure thinking is universal with respect to its content if the content to be thought is not about this or that object but rather only about thinking itself. Precisely because thinking is only thinking itself, it is an act of thinking which is not distinguished from what it thinks, its content. It may sound as if for pure thinking to be immersed in its content means to intuit what the content itself does, which is why pure knowledge ‘must step back from its content, allowing it free play and without determining it further’ (GW21: 59). But Hegel is not advocating the view that there is a strange entity, the content, performing acts of reflection on its own and independently of thinkers logically cognizing them. Rather, it means that pure thinking is an act of thinking in which the content to be thought, namely a pure concept, is itself the very concept through which it is to be thought and not by predicating a different concept of it.

Second, pure thinking is universal in regard to its form if pure thinking is not about me but rather the universal self-consciousness abstracting from all particularities of this or that thinker (cf. Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2019: 84). Of course, in distinguishing sharply between inner sense and apperception, Kant’s account also pays heed to the demand that the peculiar nature of the individual subject does not figure in the conception of the self-consciousness of its acts of representation (cf. Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 150).

For Hegel, Kant’s account of apperception remains subjectivistic to the extent that it does not endorse the universality of self-consciousness with respect to its content since the content is not immanent to but external to self-consciousness.Footnote ⁸ This is supported by Hegel’s following evaluation that through Kant’s consideration of

We can gather from this passage that Hegel has reservations about Kant’s notion of apperception to the extent that it still involves the idea that self-conscious thinking is still to be distinguished from what is thought in such a self-conscious manner. His own notion of the Concept is supposed to overcome this deficiency by eliminating any reference to a given content to be thought such that thinking is purely self-conscious, i.e. that thinking only thinks itself. While self-consciousness concerns the fact that in thinking a given object, I think myself to think that object, pure self-consciousness is thinking only thinking itself.

IV.ii. Hegel on the identity of apperception and objectivity

Harking back to my initial presentation of Hegel’s critique of Kant, Hegel goes so far as claiming that Kant’s subjectivistic construal of apperception is even in tension with his contention in §17 of the B-deduction, which Hegel takes to mean that ‘[t]he objectivity of thought […] is an identity of concept and thing which is the truth’ (GW12: 23). This is to say that Hegel resolves the tension he sees in Kant by realizing that the unity of pure self-consciousness is nothing other than what constitutes the unity of the object thereby conceiving of the former not as an act of thinking which is to be contrasted with its object. Hegel further clarifies that the Concept is identical to the object only with respect to what it is essentially, i.e. what the object is in general in itself, and not what is contingent about it in so far as it is a particular object appearing to our senses (cf. GW12: 18, 21, 24). This supports my reading that there is no conflict between regarding the Concept as the principle of speculative logic and identifying the Concept with pure self-consciousness.

Hegel also acknowledges that ‘other Kantians’, presumably Fichte, have sought to de-psychologize Kant’s concept of apperception

This means that despite Hegel’s hesitations to use the term ‘pure self-consciousness’ to introduce the speculative logic, he conceives of pure thinking effectively along the idea of a pure self-consciousness, which is universal with respect to its form and its content. In appropriating the talk of ‘the objectifying act of the “I”’, Hegel is saying that pure thinking is thinking which has only itself as its object in the sense that it is productive of thinking itself.Footnote ⁹ But in discussing this idea of self-objectifying thinking, Hegel makes explicit why he eschews all talk of self-consciousness in his logic favouring the term ‘pure thinking’ instead:

Since Kant conceives of self-conscious thinking as being opposed to the object in so far as the object thought is independent of being thought and given by sensibility, Hegel questions whether talking of pure self-consciousness might be more confusing than illuminating. However, there is also the contrary pitfall of treating pure thinking or the Concept as onto-logical form independent of our acts of thinking. For this would reintroduce a gap between us thinking this self-standing onto-logical form and this very logical form itself (cf. Rödl Reference Rödl2018: 96–97). In fact, Hegel’s talk of ‘overreaching subjectivity’ (GW20: 218, §215R) is supposed to ward off this confusion because the Concept cannot be understood as a neutral unity of self-consciousness and objectivity but rather this unity is only in thinking this very unity. The metaphysical readings verge on and some of them collapse into a reification of reason which makes reason some structure over and above our acts of thinking. But this reintroduces the sceptical worry of how we can account for coming to know or cognitively access this onto-logical form in the first place.

To sum up, despite appearances to the contrary, thinking purely is simply conceiving of the self-consciousness of thinking independently of any particular content thought. Hegel’s programmatic claim is that although Kant’s account of apperception already captures what the Concept is, it is still impaired by its subjectivistic construal. To shed this psychological guise of the Concept, is not to change the topic altogether but rather to purify the idea of self-consciousness.

V.i. The Kantian reading: appropriating the synthetic unity of apperception

Having dealt with the metaphysical interpretation, I shall now turn to the Kantian reading which takes seriously Hegel’s own remark that Kant’s apperception is to be used as a guide for understanding his concept of the Concept. What is problematic with Kant’s account of apperception is framed through its formalism, which as we have seen, amounts to the doctrine that the unity of apperception, i.e. the Concept, is merely the formal unity of thinking which consists in the abstract universality such that thinking is empty without a sensibly given content. Contrary to the metaphysical reading, the Kantian readers hold that Hegel not so much replaces Kant’s apperception with the absolute negativity of the Concept but rather modifies Kant’s account by overcoming its formalism in accordance with his battle cry: eliminate externality!

While for McDowell this means that Hegel eliminates ‘brute-fact externality to the spatial and temporal form of our sensibility’ (2009: 85), such that the forms of intuition are internal to the forms of thinking, for most Kantian readers this slogan epitomizes a more ambitious program.Footnote ¹⁰ Rather, Hegel is said to circumvent Kant’s formalism by realizing that there is no need for an external content provided by sensibility because pure thinking has in and of itself its own content being a synthetic unity a priori (cf. de Boer Reference De Boer2010: 34–35). Such Kantian readings thus trade on passages where Hegel praises Kant’s account of apperception in so far as Kant was the first to see that the Concept is ‘the original synthetic unity of apperception, the unity of the “I think”, or of self-consciousness’ (GW12: 18) and that pure thinking contains ‘synthetic judgments a priori’ (GW12: 22), having ‘original synthesis of apperception’ (GW12: 22) as its principle since ‘this original synthetic unity must be conceived, not as produced out of opposites, but as a truly necessary, absolute, original identity of opposites’ (GW4: 327, cf. GW20: 78).

In this vein, for example, Longuenesse writes that ‘Hegel’s concept, like Kant’s concept, has a unifying function’ (2007: 30). She goes on to elaborate that in contrast to Kant, ‘this function operates not on sensible intuitions […] but on thought-determinations’ (2007: 30). Chiming in with Longuenesse’s interpretation, de Boer also claims that ‘Hegel comprehends each pure concept as a particular determination of the concept as such, that is, as a finite result from its attempt to establish the synthetic unity of its contrary determinations’ (2010: 57; cf. 44). Accordingly, de Boer points out that ‘[u]nlike Kant, Hegel argues that pure concepts can only yield synthetic a priori judgments if they are already synthetic in themselves’, and illustrates this claim further by saying that for Hegel ‘a pure concept such as substance consists precisely in the synthesis of its contrary determinations, that is, in the unity of “substance” and “property”’ (2010: 42). In a similar spirit, the closest Pippin comes to ‘demystify[ing] a bit the strange notion of autonomous self-negation, a negating that negates itself’, is via Kant’s antinomial concepts such as the smallest particle which could help, because ‘[e]ach such pure concept must also be the contrary of itself, as Kant shows in his “dialectical” reasoning’ (Reference Pippin2019: 149). But it remains unclear in which sense these concepts must be the contrary of themselves, i.e. whether these pure concepts simply presuppose their contraries in order to be intelligible or whether they really contain their contraries in themselves. It seems as if Pippin is opting for the former. In contrast, de Boer explicitly elucidates the synthetic unity of contrary determinations in terms of the reciprocal containment of the opposed concepts (cf. 2010: especially 82).

V.ii. Hegel’s charge of formalism and the problem of synthesis

The problem with these apperception readings comes to the fore once one considers that Hegel takes issue with the idea of synthesis precisely because the term ‘“synthesis”, easily conjures up again the picture of an external unity, of a mere combination of terms that are intrinsically separate’ (GW12: 22–23). This remark suggests that to understand Hegel’s appropriation of Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception, one should precisely not focus on this synthetic character first.Footnote ¹¹ Yet, this is what proponents of a Kantian reading of Hegel’s Concept seem to do.

As we have seen, Longuenesse and de Boer explain Hegel’s Concept in terms of synthesizing contrary thought-determinations. But the real puzzle is how pure thinking can provide such thought-determinations from itself in the first place. It might be thought that synthesis cannot only be about what is synthesized but about whether this synthesis is an original act or merely an external act of combination. Therefore, Pippin highlights Hegel’s idea of original division:

In this passage, Pippin gives an answer to the problem of external synthesis by presupposing an original, concrete unity which can then be differentiated, thereby accounting for the further determination of pure thinking. Consequently, Pippin is committed to the idea that pure thinking cannot be an originally empty and simple unity which articulates itself. While being oriented not so much towards Kant’s account of apperception but rather towards his concept of purposiveness, I think that Ng’s approach to model Hegel’s Concept on an original organic unity which divides itself runs into the same difficulty (cf. 2020: 14–16; 168–78; cf. also Wretzel Reference Wretzel2018).

In a similar fashion, de Boer pauses to reflect that Hegel’s presentation of absolute negation is wanting. For de Boer, absolute negativity is to be regarded as reciprocity since ‘the contrary determinations of a particular concept must both give up their purported comprehensiveness, and both enact a double negation to achieve their synthesis’ (2010: 82). However, the fact that this reciprocity serves as the model for Hegel’s logical method ‘is obscured by Hegel’s own description of his method in terms of two subsequent negations. This description takes recourse to a conception of dialectics according to which a particular determination necessarily turns into its contrary’ such that ‘it does not do justice to the reciprocity of contrary determinations which, in my view, is presupposed throughout the Logic’ (de Boer Reference De Boer2010: 82–83). This means that de Boer regards the way of presenting absolute negation in terms of reciprocity of contrary determinations as in fact superior to Hegel’s linear presentation of the logical movement enacted by absolute negation.

While Longuenesse’s, de Boer’s and Pippin’s accounts are not simply wrong, I contend that they are severely limited because they work only once pure thinking has already produced different thought-determinations or concrete synthetic unities of such thought-determinations which are subject to further articulation. Contrary to them, I will propose that one has to understand how the Concept can contain ‘differentiation within itself’ first and that this requires appreciating the original emptiness and simplicity of the Concept as absolute negativity. However, Pippin overtly confesses that he cannot make sense of the ‘obscure notion’ of absolute negation in the sense of ‘a negation of pure negation itself’ (Reference Pippin2019: 171, n.59).Footnote ¹² Contrary to Pippin, I take it that most metaphysical readings insist on making conceptual room for such self-negation.

I think we have arrived at the heart of the dispute between the Kantian and metaphysical reading: the Kantian readers seek to make Hegel’s Concept and its absolute negativity intelligible in terms of the more familiar and accessible account of self-consciousness and its synthetic unitary character, whereas the metaphysical readers attempt to capture the absolute negation of the Concept in terms of the self-referential operation of negation modelled on sentential negation. While the Kantian reading rejects this autonomous negation as obscure and artificial, the metaphysical readers regard the appeal to Kant’s idea of synthetic unity inadequate to come to grips with Hegel’s key methodological notion. Therefore, both readings share an underlying assumption that Hegel’s notion of absolute negation in the sense of negating negation itself sits uncomfortably with understanding Hegel’s Concept in virtue of Kant’s apperception. In what follows, I will show that seeing Hegel’s Concept and its absolute negativity as radicalizing Kant’s account of pure apperception can render absolute negation intelligible without making it an artificial and arbitrary logical operation.

VI.i. The absolute negativity of the concept and the original emptiness of apperception

Kant’s transcendental logic is guided by the famous principle that ‘[t]houghts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’ (A51/B75). Hence, it is one of Kant’s basic tenets that thinking itself, pure thinking, is empty. For Kant pure thinking is devoid of any content because in thinking only itself, thinking thinks nothing. Let us unpack this idea in more detail: since self-consciousness is a consciousness which is identical to that of which it is a consciousness, the ‘I think’ is an empty representation which neither produces its object nor adds any content to representations of objects (cf. B145). Otherwise, it could not be the self-conscious representation but rather another representation of a representation. Therefore, pure self-consciousness, which is the act not of thinking this or that but only the act of thinking itself, cannot be an act of thinking about anything.

Since thinking is self-conscious, thinking has to ‘turn in a constant circle, since we must always already avail ourselves of the representation of it [the “I”] at all times in order to judge anything about it’ (A346/B404). In other words, one cannot make thinking one’s object of thinking, that is, think thinking, without thereby having already comprehended it as itself. The self-consciousness of thinking conceived in its abstraction from any other object of thinking is the pure relation of thinking to itself, the absolutely simple act of thinking. ‘For through the I, as a simple representation, nothing manifold is given; it can only be given in the intuition, which is distinct from it’ (B135; my emphasis). With Kant’s account of pure apperception in mind, I will now turn to the question of how Hegel reconceives the emptiness of pure thinking in such a way as to argue that pure thinking can determine itself and thus provide content from itself.

Hegel begins with the idea of pure thinking, that is, thinking thinking only itself, which means that thinking as the concept of thinking relates only to itself as the object of thinking. Hegel considers the act of thinking to be an assertive act of predication which is an act of determining something through a concept (cf. GW20: 65–66, §20–21; 70–71, §28; 71–72, §31; GW12: 54–57; cf. Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 63, 134). The act of thinking or concept is true if it agrees with its object, or conversely the object is true if it agrees with its concept.Footnote ¹³ Now, thinking only thinking itself, is thinking the concept to be determined only through itself. The Concept is the self-determining concept which is why Hegel also says that ‘it is simple self-relation’ and also speaks of the ‘pure self-relation of the concept’ (GW12: 33; translation modified).Footnote ¹⁴ Being self-determination, the Concept is formed or constituted only by itself, whereas in determining a determinate concept, the concept to be determined and the determining concept are not identical. Therefore, the Concept is not merely general but the universal in the quantitative sense of being the concept of the object of thinking as such precisely because it makes no distinction and is the absolutely simple unity, or as Hegel puts it: ‘Universality seems incapable of explanation, because it is the simplest of determinations’ (GW12: 33).

A key to appreciating how Hegel seeks to move beyond Kant’s account of apperception is contained in his assertion that ‘[t]he further step which speculative philosophy had to take was to apprehend the negativity which is immanent within the universal or the identical, as in the “I”’ (GW14: 33–34, §6). I take Hegel to be drawing our attention to the fact that the universal unity of the ‘I’ is immanently negative in so far as it is absolutely indeterminate or empty.

Hegel’s reasoning runs along the following lines:Footnote ¹⁵ to think a concept is to think its content. A concept can have a determinate content, being this or that concept, only by distinguishing itself from its contradictory concept. Hence, to think only thinking itself is to negate or abstract from thinking any determinate concept. Otherwise, thinking would not think only itself but rather some thought-determination in opposition to some other. Thinking thinking itself means not negating this or that determination, but determination as such. But since determination is differentiation and thus negation, negating determination as such is to negate negation as such. Put differently, this absolute negation negates itself for in negating negation as such it negates the act of negation. Consequently, pure thinking being absolute negation is self-contradictory because it is through the act of negation in virtue of which it excludes negation at the same time. Accordingly, Hegel asserts that ‘the concept is absolute self-identity by being first just this, the negation of negation or the infinite unity of negativity with itself’ (GW12: 33). Hegel thus maintains that Kant does not appreciate the self-contradiction which is essential to the entirely empty unity of apperception which Hegel conceives in terms of the absolute negativity of the Concept.

We are now in a position, on the one hand, to address the worry that self-negation is an obscure notion which rather needs to be deflated in terms of Hegel’s appeal to the synthetic unity of apperception (cf. Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 171, n.59), and on the other hand, to evaluate metaphysical interpretations of Hegel’s notion of absolute negation (Bowman Reference Bowman2013: 48–54; Koch Reference Koch1999: especially 18–23; Houlgate Reference Houlgate, Houlgate and Baur2011: especially 142–45; Martin Reference Martin2012: 37–54), which are inspired by Henrich’s landmark studies on this topic (cf. 1976, 1978, 2003, 2010).

I will bring out what is problematic with this reading by focusing on Koch’s reading as one of its paradigmatic proponents: first, Koch has a tendency to gloss absolute negation in terms of sentential negation and thus as a logical operation taking ‘non-propositional primordial states of affairs’ (1999: 10) as its arguments of which pure being, i.e. being-the-case, is the first one (cf. 2003: 19, 21; 2018: 52, 47–49). Second, Koch construes the self-contradictory character of self-negation in virtue of a self-referential operation of negation which takes the operation itself as its own operandum (1999: 1–2, 15–17, 21–22; 2003: 23–24; 2018: 66–67).Footnote ¹⁶ Third, this operation of self-negation yields two results due to its contradictory nature: either it can be considered to be absolute affirmation or as absolute negation. To illustrate the two outcomes, Koch unfolds the result of the self-referential negation into a potentially infinite series of negation signs which can be either read as double negation which cancels negation ‘∼∼(∼∼(∼∼…))’ or as simple negation ‘∼(∼(∼(∼(∼…))))’ depending on the way in which brackets are inserted into the series (cf. 1999: 22–23; 2003: 25; 2018: 85–86, 88–90). Fourth, Koch takes this operation to be at the very heart of Hegel’s speculative logic which he presupposes at the beginning of the logic in order to proceed from being to other pure contents. Accordingly, the (self-referential) negation is an artificial logical operation to be assumed as a hypothesis at the outset of the logic which is to be justified in the course of its own unfoldment (cf. 1999: 10; 2003: 21; 2018: 54–55).Footnote ¹⁷

Contrary to Henrich’s (cf. 1976: 214–15; 1978: 254; 2003: 317) and Koch’s (cf. 1999: 1–2) suggestion, negation should not be simply modelled on sentential negation but rather with the idea that thinking concepts is to make a distinction and thus to make use of negation.Footnote ¹⁸ We saw already above that Hegel considers thinking as predication which is at the same time an affirmation. Therefore, it makes sense for him to say that thinking only thinking itself is to think only the predicate or the concept through itself (cf. GW20: 122, §85R). Furthermore, just as Kant takes the ‘I think’ to be the concept, which can be said of everything and which is itself determined only through itself, Hegel considers the Concept to be the universal which is the concept which determines itself only through itself. Consequently, the self-contradiction should also be understood through the model of conceptual rather than sentential contradiction.

But it cannot be a conceptual contradiction in the analytic sense either since this would be contradiction between the moments of the content of a concept, for instance being circular and being square, which is absurd. And this fact might motivate the Kantian readers’ resistance against full-heartedly embracing the idea of absolute negation. But the self-contradiction in question is a performative rather than an analytic one (cf. Martin Reference Martin2012: 594–95). This means that it is to be construed as a contradiction between the act of forming a concept and the resulting concept. The concept is such a performative self-contradiction for, as we have seen, the concept is the indeterminate universal only in virtue of being distinguished from making a distinction such that the undifferentiated concept is precisely constituted by drawing a difference. This is covered up in Koch’s account of self-referential negation because for him absolute negation has two opposed results which are to be conceived as two sides or aspects of one and the same operation. In contrast, I contend that it is crucial to see them as the formative and resulting moment which Koch’s illustration of the twofold bracketing of an infinite series of negation makes at least difficult to see.

Furthermore, this reading is supported by the fact that while Kant conceives of a self-contradictory concept as nothing in the sense of a nihil negativum (cf. A291–92/B348), Hegel repeatedly stresses ‘that what is self-contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content’ (GW21: 38). Therefore, to say that the Concept is essentially self-contradictory means not taking delight in finding analytic contradictions and stopping there. Rather, the performative self-contradiction in thinking the Concept is precisely what forces us to re-conceive the Concept in such a way which resolves the contradiction. This is why Hegel underscores that ‘[a] thing, a subject, a concept, is then precisely this negative unity; it is something inherently self-contradictory, but it is no less the resolved contradiction’ (GW11: 289). In short, the self-contradiction of the Concept shows that the Concept is not as it ought to be thereby giving rise to the need to resolve it. The self-contradiction can be resolved only by integrating the determination of how the Concept is thought into the content of the Concept thus thought. What the self-contradiction thus reveals not to be possible is to abstract from the way in which the Concept is thought.

We have seen that Kant implicitly acknowledges that apperception has such a performative self-contradictory nature by calling attention to the ‘inconvenience’ that in thinking the ‘I think’ we must ‘turn in a constant circle’ (A346/B404). Hegel retorts to Kant that ‘surely it is laughable to label the nature of this self-consciousness, namely that the “I” thinks itself, that the “I” cannot be thought without the “I” thinking it, an awkwardness and, as if it were a fallacy, a circle’ (GW12: 194). What Hegel finds laughable is the complaint that the nature of self-consciousness is obscure because it cannot be captured in terms of a judgement determining something which is independent of being thus determined. The self-determining and thus performatively self-contradictory character of self-consciousness is not mystifying. For it is simply the nature of the Concept that it ‘is the absolute self-relation that, as dividing judgment, makes itself into an object and consists in simply making itself thereby into a circle’ (GW12: 194).

Once one accepts that pure self-consciousness is to be characterized as pure self-determination, Pippin’s bogeyman of negation ‘spinning in the void’ can be debunked. The absolute negation is to be understood as a construal of this self-determination in negative terms in so far as the concept of ‘I think’ can neither be determined nor determined by something else, it can only consist in being indeterminate as the negation of making any distinctions. Therefore, contrary to interpreters like Henrich and Koch, absolute negation should not be viewed as an artificial logical operation which one ought to assume at the outset of the speculative logic; a presupposition whose validity is then to be proven by its fruitfulness. The concept of self-relating negation is nothing other than what the concept of purely self-relating thinking is, which Hegel prefers to call the Concept.

VI.ii. The original emptiness of the concept as the ground for its self-determined content

I have argued that we can come to understand the sense in which for Hegel pure thinking is absolutely negative by coming to comprehend it as absolutely empty or indeterminate. This fact is often overlooked since Hegel often criticizes Kant for endorsing a conception on which ‘[t]he I, the unity of self-consciousness, is quite abstract and entirely indeterminate’ thus prompting the question of ‘[h]ow is one then to arrive at the determinations of the I, the categories’ (GW20: 79–80, §42). Indeed, Hegel stresses that the Concept is not only the universal which is abstract, simple, and empty but also concrete, synthetic and contentful. But for Hegel the concreteness of the Concept can only be understood in virtue of the fact that being empty and indeterminate, the Concept itself presupposes a further determination thereby unfolding into series of pure concepts.

Now, we have seen that being entirely empty or absolutely negative, the Concept must be self-contradictory. But precisely because the Concept is performatively self-contradictory in this way, it must resolve its contradiction by dividing itself, thereby determining itself and providing a pure conceptual content. Hegel writes:

What Hegel is saying here is that the Concept as the universal differentiates into the indeterminate universal and the particular since the Concept contains in a self-contradictory manner both, the universal, i.e. absolute simplicity, as well as the particular, i.e. difference as such. The Concept as the universal thus contains its own two species within itself.

In this self-division of the universal, the imperfect universal as well as the particular are both limited by each other and thus equally particular. So, the universal is itself particular by figuring as one side of the whole difference. In being opposed to the particular, the universal is juxtaposed to the particular thereby being rendered into a particular itself (cf. GW12: 38). Therefore, it seems at this point as if the conceptual difference between universality and particularity cannot be upheld because so long as the universal figures in a relation to the particular it is itself not universal in encompassing itself and its opposed concept.

But the universality of the Concept sustains itself in the course of its self-specification, not because both logical determinations have in common that they are particular, ‘but because their determinateness over against each other is at the same time essentially only one determinateness; it is the negativity which in the universal is simple’ (GW12: 38). I take Hegel’s point to be that the opposition between the universal and the particular can be contradictory only if it is expressive of their unity such that the true universal just is this very opposition. The particular, understood as the opposition between the particular and the universal, is the universal since this difference must encompass both in order for them to be opposed by simply being not what the other is not.

From this discussion it follows, that the Concept as the universal is the particular since it must divide itself into the species, the (abstract) universal and the particular, and the Concept as the particular is the universal because it is to be understood as the whole difference between two particular species of the Concept. Therefore, both determinations of the Concept, the universal and the particular, have shown themselves to be the totality of determinations of the Concept: each is itself as much as its opposite (cf. GW12: 49). Since the seemingly opposed determinations of the Concept, the universal and the particular, are in fact understood in the same way, they have reduced themselves to be moments rather than the whole Concept itself. As moments they are synthetically united in a more concrete concept of the Concept, namely the singular (cf. GW20: 179, §163).

Therefore, no externally given manifold is needed to supply content to the Concept, since the difference between the universal and the particular is its ‘only true content’ (GW12: 41). The Concept ‘obtains its differentiated determinations in the moment of negativity or of absolute determining; and the content is only these determinations of the absolute form and nothing else’ (GW12: 25). Against Kant, Hegel thus argues that thinking can have in and of itself content even though he admits that the content of the Concept, namely the conceptual moments of the universal and the particular (and the singular), are abstract, judged in comparison to the content sensibility can provide us with. The Concept as the singular is said to be concrete also in the sense that it contains what is essential to anything thought, whereas the seemingly richer content given by sensibility pertains only to the accidental being of the object. Hegel puts this point in terms of distinguishing between a ‘sensuous totality’ (GW12: 41) and an ‘objective totality’ which is ‘an intellectual one’ (GW12: 42). The dialectical argument above is intended to show that pure thinking can produce its own content because the singular is the concrete universal which contains in itself what is more particular; a feat which Kant had reserved for an intuitive understanding which can proceed from the synthetic-universal to the particular (cf. GW12: 25; AA5: 406–407).

We have seen that Hegel complains that Kant’s account of apperception must regard the synthetic unity as dependent on being given a manifold from the outside. In contrast, Hegel’s alternative account is that precisely by beginning with the conception of pure thinking as indeterminate and empty, namely the universal, it is shown that this conception is self-contradictory and thus must be replaced by another concept, i.e. the singular, which consists in the synthetic unity of the universal and the particular. Hegel thus says that ‘[j]ust as that with which we began was the universal, so the result is the singular, the concrete, the subject’ (GW12: 248). Since for Hegel the logical ‘progression is a retreat to the ground, to the origin’ (GW21: 57), the development from the empty, abstract universal to the synthetic, concrete singular can be considered as Hegel’s own version of Kant’s claim that the analytic unity of apperception presupposes the original synthetic unity of apperception (B133).

This mode of self-determination is at work in the entire speculative logic since pure thinking determines its own concept further in virtue of dividing its concept into more determinate concepts which provide the basis for being synthesized into a new, more concrete concept of what pure thinking is. Hegel suggests this by saying that ‘being, existence, something, or whole and part, and so on, […] are thought determinations on their own; as determinate concepts, however, they are grasped in so far as each is cognized in unity with its others or in opposition to them’ (GW12: 38). In other words, while in the logical spheres of being and essence, the pure concepts in question are not yet put forward as what they are, namely pure concepts as concrete unities of thought-determinations, their logical development depends on the fact that the self-determination of pure thinking proceeds via the self-specification of the universal into the particular and its synthesis into the singular, concrete Concept.

Hegel warns us to think of the conceptual analysis of a concrete concept as disassembling it again into the previous concepts which it unifies (cf. GW21: 45). Instead, a concrete concept serves as the basis of a further determination of pure thinking since its concrete unity can be dissected into varieties of how the previous concepts can be taken to be unified (cf. GW10: 309, §114).Footnote ¹⁹ In other words, the Concept is concrete in being modelled on an organic unity in which each part is not only a means but also the end so that each partial concept must also be considered as the whole Concept, rather than being modelled on an aggregate according to which a concept is merely the sum of partial concepts or marks. This organic unity of the Concept can be seen to inherit and vindicate Kant’s characterization of the systematic unity of speculative reason in terms of the purposive and articulated unity of an organism (cf. Bxxxvii–iii/A832–33, B860–61). At first, the Concept must be the absolutely simple universal but once it has determined itself, its concrete unity functions analogously to what Kant has called a synthetic-universal which can be unfolded through itself into its different determinations.

We are finally in a position to appreciate why Hegel is entitled to claim that the form of the ‘I think’, ‘when thought out in its purity, will then have within itself the capacity to determine itself, that is, to give itself a content […]—as a system of thought-determinations’ (GW21: 48).