The Ground of Existence – 2: Elaboration

1.      Hegel arrives at the ground of existence in Part II of The Science of Logic under the Doctrine of Essence.

Hegel’s philosophy is an evolutionary, integrated whole, in which the order of appearance of categories corresponds to their logical place in the system. So saying that the ground of existence is a category under the Doctrine of Essence is more than a random citation from Logic’s table of contents. It is also a reference to the coordinates of the ground of existence in the Hegelian dialectic. We need that information to determine how best to go about explaining the category.

2.      The Logic – as the The Science of Logic is known to the students of Hegel – has three divisions:

I. Doctrine of Being

II. Doctrine of Essence

III. Doctrine of Notion

The Doctrine of Being is concerned with what a thing is.

The Doctrine of Essence is concerned with how it has come to be.

The Doctrine of Notion is concerned with why it has come to be.

If we know what a thing is, how it has come to be, and to what end it is designed (and capable of progressing), we would know everything there is to know about the thing.

3.      The main categories of the Doctrine of Being are quantity, quality and measure. Every being is defined by these three main attributes.

Quality and quantity are well known: they are the two, famously mutually-exclusive attributes of a thing.

The measure is the third leg of the triad in which the chasm between quality and quantity is overcome. Hegel shows that the opposition between quality and quantity – that one always excludes the other – is not absolute and that accumulation of quantitative changes in a being results in a qualitative change. If we heat water beyond 100 degrees Celsius, for example, its quality changes from water into steam. That point of quantum leap is what he calls measure.

4.      The being cannot explain itself. It just is, so we accept it as a fact. But how it came about to be is impossible to determine by studying it. A being must come from something more profound than itself. That something is the “opposite” of being in the sense that while the being is, and so it directly appeals to our senses, what explains it is not perceptible by senses and must be deduced logically. This process of logical deduction is called mediation.

“Being comes into mediation with itself through the negation of itself,” Hegel wrote. What he is saying is that being “negates” itself, meaning that the mind cannot accept it as the source of its own existence, so the mind is forced into contemplation – or mediation.

The mediation of the being – where it has come from – is the realm of the Doctrine of Essence.

5.      I know of no other western book that surprises and at times even startles like Logic. There are many great books and some true masterpieces which have shaped our lives. Reading them, we are humbled, enlightened and awed by the reach of the human mind.

Hegel alone startles. That is because his philosophy proceeds along overcoming and going beyond Understanding. Understanding is that crude stage of comprehension where the mind only sees the differences.

Beyond Understanding there is the more advanced stage of cognition called Reason where the differences perceived by Understanding are found to be illusory. As Hegel’s dialectic continually aims towards Reason, it constantly lays bare the shortcomings of Understanding. That surprises and startles us. We are surprised how “self evident truths” turn out to be partial and thus, false. You saw that with the idea of measure. Upon first reading it, the mind receives a jolt from the idea of a qualitative quantity, which is what the measure is.

Now, take appearance. How many times you have been told to ignore the appearance and focus on the essence of things, and that the appearance is illusory and the essence is the permanent and the one that counts.

Hegel laughs at the idea. Essence and appearance are the one and same thing, he tells us. “Essence must appear”, he writes tersely, meaning that it’s the essence that appears. The conduct is the man. This president could have done so and so but was prevented by circumstances and detractors, or that general was a great strategist and tactician but was beaten by some folks in bed sheets and flip flops because he was distracted by bimbos – these are all drivel. In both cases – in all cases – we have the essence of the men in full display in their conduct. The same is true of the phenomena.

It is the essence that appears. Of course! What else could appear? How could one not see this obvious point – or lose the sight of it?

6.      Essence and appearance are the categories of the Doctrine of Essence, where the categories come in pairs: form and content, cause and effect and identity and difference. By way of explaining the “coming in pairs”, note that in our thought we can separate the idea of quantify from that of quality; the thought of one does not involve the thought of the other. Not so with the categories of the Doctrine of Essence. We cannot think form without thinking content. Or think cause without thinking effect. Or positive without negative. The thought of these correlative categories involves one another; each one defines, and is simultaneously defined by, the other.

7.      Let us develop this point of dependence of one thing on another further through the categories of identity and difference.

Suppose you are asked to compare New York to Tokyo. Even if you have not been to either city you can probably write a page on the subject.

Now, compare a camel and a pencil.

Here, you can’t really say much except that a camel is a camel and a pencil is a pencil.

In doing so, you would be repeating the famous laws of the identity and contradiction in the classical logic which hold that A is A and A is never B.

These laws are not so much wrong but “silly,” according to Hegel. They express abstract conditions which have no significance. There is nothing in common between a pencil and a camel, so the act of comparison is absurd.

We can meaningfully compare two entities if they have similarities and differences. The differences shed light on similarities. Similarities shed light on the difference. That is why using an analogy from optics, Hegel called them the categories of reflection. Like an object and its image in a glass, they shed light on one another, which is also why they come in pairs. There is a being that supports and a being that is supported.

Returning to our example of the two cities, precisely because New York and Tokyo are both large cities that we can say Tokyo is safer than New York. And precisely because they are in two different countries that we can say taxi fare in New York is cheaper than in Tokyo. It would be absurd to compare taxi fare in New York with taxi fare in New York, which is what A = A is.

7A.(To establish his concept of “utility”, Paul Samuelson began by equating the U.S. navy and an apple. He was in earnest. Of course, what he really proved was that his “theory” was viable to the extent that there are similarities between an apple and the U.S. navy. No matter. He made a fortune as an economist, won the Nobel Prize and was hailed a “titan”. Read Nasser’s devastating indictment of this charlatan here and here . It is telling that even now many think that he was a philosopher. Truly, only in America.)

8.      New York and Tokyo are merely different. Tokyo is different from New York, but so are Taipei and Istanbul and Dakar. From the difference, Hegel develops the concept of opposite, where each entity has only one opposite on which it depends: day and night, hot and cold, positive and negative.

9.      The development proceeds along the following lines. Likeness, we saw, depends on unlikeness. Unlikeness, in a similar way, depends on likeness. Each of these two categories depends on the other. One could not exist without the other. That is the category of opposite. Positive and negative are opposites. They are defined by one another and could not exist independent of each other.

10.  At this point we arrive at the ground of existence which is identity in difference. In the same way that measure was the third leg of triad (with quantity and quality) and reconciled their differences in itself , the ground of existence is the third leg of the triad that begins with identity and difference and, in a like manner, reconciles and resolves their opposition in itself. Measure was quantitative quality. Ground of existence is identity in difference.

11.  Identity in difference might sound paradoxical and confusing to Understanding. But we are beyond that and in the realm of Reason! We know what it means. When we speak of essence and appearance, we are speaking of identity in difference. Essence and appearance are two different things. But they are the same. It is the essence that appears! If there were no appearance, there would be no essence. In a like manner, if there were no essence, nothing could appear. Essence and appearance, form and content and force and its manifestation all express the idea of identity in difference.

12.  When there is a ground of existence, there must be something that is grounded. If positive is the ground, then negative is grounded – and vice versa. The ground of existence of a thing is thus part of the thing itself. Otherwise, it would be external to it and thus, incidental and contingent.

13.  Understanding only sees the external relations which are incidental and contingent. So it sees the phenomenal world as a congeries of objects which stand independently by themselves and at times come into contact with one another, influencing and impacting one another. It is the partial and one-sided view of It’s Wonderful Life where the protagonist’s life “touches” many people’s lives.

14.  In such as world, there could be no law, no organization and no planning. Capra's movie admits that much. Witness that its central story is an accident of birth which determines whether a community will be sinful and corrupt or beautiful and peaceful.

That is another variation of the hero worship theme, the stuff of going back in time to kill Hitler to prevent WWII! It is vulgarity through and through with Hollywood its ground of existence.

15.  Returning to variety which pervades the world, note that its correlative category is constancy. Variable would have no significance if they were no constant.

Constancy and identity fully reveal themselves in the ground of existence, as follows.

16.  The phenomena are what they are by virtue of the working of their inner organizing principle. More concisely, they reflect their ground of existence, that permanent entity that preserves and manifests itself in the midst of infinite variety. Hegel uses the example of the Ego to illuminate this point. All the variety of a person’s actions and conduct under various circumstances find a common ground in the centrality of his “personality”, which remains unchanged.

17.  The ground of existence is the constant in the midst of variable. But it is constant up to a point. Like a man’s personality, it has the potential to change over time under the influence of an even greater force. That force is the subject of the final stage of the Logic in the Doctrine of Notion. There, Hegel shows that the Idea, the supreme logic of the world, is the true constant because in changing, it changes into itself.

Ground of existence, however, is sufficiently constant that its changes, while at times barely perceptible, are noteworthy events. Such are the changes currently taking place in the US

18.  The system of checks and balances is the leitmotif of democracies. Everyone is taught that the separation of the branches is the foundation of a democratic government and that the legislative and the judicial branches exist to ensure that executive branch could not usurp undue power, which is what happens in the “authoritarian regimes.” The mantra is repeated often enough that it become an article of faith to the citizenry, the most obvious of the self-evident truths.

19.  Hegel laughs at the idea! In the Doctrine of Notion, he deduces the three factors of notion as universal, particular and individual. These categories follow the ground of existence, so contain the idea of unity in difference – but they contain more. Each factor is distinct from the other two but at the same time contain them. I am a unique individual, while at the same time belonging to a particular group (male species, for example) and the wider universal human race. No individual can exists without belonging to a universal. In a like manner, no universal can exist without having produced an individual sample.

20.  The three branches of the US government, like the three factors of the Notion, are aspects of the one and the same whole which is the state. Each one of them stands separate from the other two, but at the same time individually contains them; each branch individually reflects and represents the state. If that were not the case – if they were independent, opposing entities – the state could not function. It would dissolve into dysfunction and chaos.

21.  The full proof that the ground of existence of the state is giving way is too long for this blog. Nor is it necessary; a few examples from the judiciary will suffice. I will return with them in the concluding part.