La casa de la iniquidad: la quinta del Astrólogo

The particular is the moment of the tripartite structure of the concept which corresponds to difference in the sphere of essence or finitude in the sphere of being—the moment in which the negative is divided from itself. Now as we have seen, the universal does not logically precede, and is nothing outside of, its particularisation. Furthermore, as we shall see in more detail later, the particular itself ‘contains’ the universal and ‘through its determinateness also exhibits it’ (SL 606/LB 38). Nevertheless, on the dominant tendency of Hegel’s account, it is clear that the relation of dependence between the universal and the particular is not equal. For while the particular contains the universal, it contains it as that which ‘constitutes its substance’ (SL 605-6/LB 38). The particular is thus only equal to

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the universal insofar as itis a posited moment of the latter. Once again, then, Hegel has recourse to the language of positing here, stating that the particular is ‘the universal’s own, immanent moment’ and that ‘it has no other determinateness than that posited by the universal’ (SL 605/LB 38, trans. modified). As in Hegel’s discussion of the universal, the particular is thus conceived in terms of the self-differentiation of the universal. Hegel even goes as far as to say that the particular is ‘the universal itself’ in the moment of its ‘shining [Scheinen] outwards’ (SL 606/LB 39).

The unity achieved through this form of the relation of the universal to the particular is again contrasted by Hegel with a lower form of unity, of the kind conceived by the understanding. As in the logic of essence, an all-or-nothing comparison is made here between an absolutely external difference and an absolutely internal difference. Yet in contrast to the sphere of essence, this external difference is not a difference which breaks out within the sphere of the concept itself, but is rather that which lies outside it, in the realm of the understanding and of nature. Because the understanding can only conceive a multiplicity in the form of a collection of distinct entities, the only unity it can attribute to them is an immediate unity. The inferiority of such a unity, for Hegel, lies in the fact that the universal through which such a diverse multiplicity is unified can only be applied

externally: ‘There is no inner standard or principle that could apply to them, simply because diversity is the difference without unity’ (SL 606/LB 39). This of course means that such a diversity could come to be united by many different universals, without any of the latter having a claim to ultimate authority.

As Hegel famously remarks, this is the kind of diversity that can be found in nature, but it is not appropriate to the concept. In the truly conceptual unity, the universal is ‘the totality and principle of its diversity, which is determined wholly and solely by the

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universal itself’ (SL 606/LB 39).13 Here there can only be one, inner unity of the particular determinations. Because the domain of the particular is thus not diverse, but absolutely unified within itself, the particular as such enters into a pure relation of opposition with the universal as such. As Hegel puts this, ‘the determinate side of particularity is complete

in the difference of the universal and the particular, and […] these two alone constitute the particular species’ (SL 607/LB 40). In nature, by contrast, there are always more than two species in a given genus, and these species are not unified as a totality but according to their external or ‘contingent’ completeness (SL 607/LB 40). Nature is thus the absolute or own other of logic:

This is the impotence [Ohnmacht] of nature, that it cannot adhere to and exhibit the strictness of the concept and runs wild in this blind irrational [begrifflos] multiplicity. We can wonder at nature’s manifold genera and species and the endless diversity of her formations, for wonderment is unreasoning and its object the irrational [das Vernunftlose] (SL 607/LB 40-41).

Now although, in the conceptual unity, the particular determinations are produced through the self-diremption of the universal, Hegel wishes to see this process as one in which the universal does not dominate, or exert any violence over, its determinations. In a frequently quoted passage, Hegel writes that the universal is ‘free power […] but not as a

13

In a manner that foreshadows the absolute method at the end of the Logic, in another passage Hegel again invokes the language of essence in describing what it means for the universal to be the principle of its determinations: ‘a principle contains the beginning and the essence of its development and realisation’ (SL 610/LB 43, trans. modified). A little earlier Hegel had already used the term ‘essence’ in a similar context, stating that ‘the particular has universality within it as its essence’ (SL 608/LB 41, trans. modified).

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violent force [ein Gewaltsames]; on the contrary, the universal is, in its other, in peaceful communion with itself [ruhig und bei sich selbst ist]’ (SL 603/LB 35-36). It could therefore, he writes, also be called ‘free love and boundless blessedness, for it bears itself towards its

other as towards itsown self; in it, it has returned to itself’ (SL 603/LB 36).

Yet even if we leave to one side the language of positing used by Hegel in this section, and if we acknowledge that the universal has no simple priority over its determinations, we might of course ask whether there is not a more subtle form of violence and domination implicit in such a self-presence—a relation to the other ‘only as to itself.’ Furthermore, there is only a lack of violence here insofar as the other precisely results from the schöpferische Macht of the universal, that is, insofar as there is no genuine other on hand, but only a modified version of the self.14 Even if the term ‘positing’ is used ‘metaphorically’ here (and we would have to question what this could mean in the conceptual logic), then the universal still enjoys a determining role in the whole process. It does so not through a simple mastery over its determinations, but through its Heruntersteigen to them.

Now of course, one might suggest that the Heruntersteigen of the universal is precisely the moment at which it renounces its privilege and ‘priority’ over the particular and freely gives itself over to the latter.15 Nevertheless, as Hegel describes it, this is a movement in which, as Derrida might put it, the universal gives itself up while keeping hold of itself: its particular determinations remain its determinations and are always already unified by it as a totality. This ‘restricted economy’ will be considered in greater

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In chapter 2 we saw how Miguel de Beistegui characterises the dialectic of identity and difference in these terms. At that point in the Logic, such a characterisation was seen to be invalid, though here it can be applied to the conceptual movement as Hegel describes it.

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detail in the following chapter through a reading of Derrida’s Glas.

As I noted above, this explicit privileging of the universal as one moment of the concept, rather than as the totality constituted by the interrelation of all of the moments of the concept, is not a necessary consequence of the structure of the concept as such. It is Hegel’s interpretation of the latter. For this reason, we can agree here with Adorno’s statement that Hegel’s ‘dismissive gesture’ toward the singular (or in this case, the particular) precisely ‘contradict[s] […] his own insight.’16 Yet Hegel’s description of the concept as the self-diremption of the universal cannot be merely brushed aside as a heuristic, an introductory device, or simply an ‘accidental’ feature of what the Hegelian concept comes to be, particularly as this description returns at the culmination of the

Logic in order to define the movement of the Logic as a whole. Nevertheless, Hegel’s presentation of the concept in this way also runs alongside a more subtle presentation of the concept as the equality and interpenetration of all of its moments. This latter dimension comes to the fore in Hegel’s account of the singular. As we noted in section 1.3.1, however, and as I shall discuss at the end of the following section, even in this form the concept still constitutes a univocal totality.