FREDRIC JAMESON

A note on reification in Hegel’s logic

Hegel was a late developer. He was 37 when the Phenomenology of Spirit

was published; and his Science of Logic followed only when he was 42. It
was his third book, written in serious professional difficulties. He still
had no university position, and was not really suited to the
Gymnasium directorship he currently occupied. The reception of the
Phenomenology, on its publication in 1807, was disappointing; indeed,
this book will not achieve the centrality it has for us today until the
work of Dilthey in the late nineteenth century.
It was rather around the Logic that what we call Hegelianism began
to be organised, it was the Logic that underwrote his eventual
professorships at Heidelberg (1816) and then Berlin (1818). The Science
of Logic – the so-called greater logic – was in fact only the first of
Hegel’s publications on the subject. A second, smaller version
appeared in the three-part Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in
1817. These works were meant to be student handbooks, and to
accompany the professor’s lectures on the subject; fortunately the
modern editions contain many of Hegel’s oral commentaries on the
individual entries, and offer a more accessible approach to them than
the monumental Greater Logic itself (in what follows, it will essentially
be the Encyclopedia Logic that is referenced, in William Wallace’s
attractive Scottish translation).
Today, however, after the emergence of symbolic logic and all the
complexities of modern mathematics (whose discovery by Boole in
1847 Hegel did not live to see), the originality of Hegel’s transformation
of traditional logic may not be so apparent. Still, the flavour of what
happened to Aristotelian logic in the schools may be conveyed by the
way in which all the possible forms of the syllogism were given proper
names in the Middle Ages; thus, Derit or Cemestres, Featino or Darapti,
Patiat, Bocardo, Ferison and Fesapo, all name specific syllogistic
formulae (one readily imagines the pedagogical practices learning such
a list encouraged!).

This text constitutes introductory remarks to a long chapter on Hegel in my forthcoming

Valences of the Dialectics.
34 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3

Hegel hit on the idea of translating the elements of the Aristotelian

logical mechanism back into genuine philosophical conceptualities.
So successful was this operation indeed that Hegel is scarcely ever
mentioned in the history of logic, as though he had somehow
suppressed the method and the mechanics which made it ‘logic’ in
the first place. These various elements (or aspects, in German,
Momente) are then lined up in what looks like a sequential or even
teleological series. To see what is really at stake here we would have to
take into account the issue of ‘presentation’ or Darstellung – how to lay
all this material out; but also to come to terms with the concluding term
of the notion – the Begriff or Absolute Spirit – which is not, I would
argue, a temporal idea or a historical stage (the German word Moment
is ambiguous: when masculine, it has the temporal sense of the English
moment; but when neuter, it simply means an aspect). What is
sequential in Hegel’s series of categories is their progressive enlarge-
ment, and the degree to which each ‘moment’ cannot stand on its own,
but is dependent on another feature or ‘seme’ outside itself which
has to be factored back into the process of thought. The ultimate
‘notion’ or Begriff is then a fully self-sufficient concept which is a
kind of ‘causa sui’ or cause of itself; Spinoza’s ‘god or nature’ would
be an appropriate analogy, and indeed Hegel thought of himself as a
competitor of Spinoza who attempted to factor subjectivity and
consciousness (‘system or subject’) into the latter’s extraordinary
vision of totality.
However we wish to see Hegel’s progression of forms, the more
general outline of both Logics is clear: the three parts – entitled Being,
Essence, and the Notion (Sein, Wesen, Begriff) in his terminology –
designate dimensions of life and thought we might describe as follows.
The categories of Being are those of common sense or a daily life
among objects, in which the law of non-contradiction holds sway; this
is the world of Verstand or Understanding (in the philosophical jargon
of the day), and it will be more thoroughly dealt with in what follows,
inasmuch as it is a thought of extension and objectivity, a reified
thought which must reify itself in order to grasp its reified objects.
The realm of Essence is, then, the way in which categories act and
react upon each other within the mind; this is more properly the realm
of the dialectic itself, in which we become aware to what degree
‘definition is negation’ (Spinoza again) and each thought is linked to
its opposite. This area may be said, in current philosophical language,
to be that of reflexivity or self-consciousness.
There remains, finally, the Notion itself, which is divided into two
zones: the Syllogism and Life. I propose to translate the first of these
Hegelian figures into the language of the logos, whose movement and
 A note on reification in Hegel’s logic 35

dynamism organises the world itself and its time. The idea of life, then
– we are still in a pre-Darwinism context, in which reference to vitalism
or the Bergsonian life force would be anachronistic – is I believe Hegel’s
way of rescuing the world of matter from mechanical materialism and
designating the organisation of the objective universe (or Nature in its
largest sense). The Absolute is then the Deleuzian ‘fold’ between these
two parallel dimensions, which in my opinion correspond to what
Spinoza called the two ‘attributes’ of cogitatio (thought) and extensio
(extension), two co-terminous and parallel dimensions or codes into
which all realities can be translated back and forth. This seems to me
what one might want to call the ‘metaphysics’ of Hegel, the sense in
which he has attempted to give ‘content’ to the abstract form of his
thinking: or ‘meaning’ to its grammar and syntax. That he himself
knows this may be deduced from his insistence on calling this third
section of the Logic ‘speculative thought’, rather than dialectics: by
which he seems to have meant that the affirmation of the identity
between thinking and its object could never be proven but only
asserted by way of a leap of reason. It is that leap (or its figural content)
which we must designate as metaphysical in all its contemporary
senses.
These notes on the Encyclopedia Logic need to be prefaced by three
observations, on my repeated use of the term ‘category’ to characterise
the structures at stake in this text, as well as on my treatment of that
temporality traditionally imputed to the way in which those categories,
in the Logic, are supposed to produce themselves and to generate their
own succession in some kind of dialectical time; to which I add a
remark on idealism. The first, or terminological negligence results from
my assumption that the Logic is Hegel’s continuation of the great
Kantian insight about the deeper organisation of Aristotle’s haphazard
list of categories. Kant’s insight was essentially a spatial one, in which
the categories were sorted out in four groups: quantity, quality,
relationship and modality (Hegel deploys the first two groups in the
Doctrine of Being, the second two in the Doctrine of Essence). It would
be of much interest to examine Kant’s arrangement in its own right (its
fourfold organisation cries out for interpretation). All we can do here is
to take note of Hegel’s extraordinary modifications in the scheme,
which in effect project Kant’s spatial groups onto temporality itself (of
which more in a moment). Although he does not use the term as such,
it seems fair to describe the moments of the Logic – which range from
topics like Being or Necessity to seemingly more minor matters, such as
Limit, Reciprocity, Accident, and the like, as a greatly enlarged list of
categories on the Kantian or Aristotelian mode. In that case, should
there not be a category of the Category itself (a popular idea during the
36 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3

structuralist period which Derrida repudiated with some contempt in

his essay on Benveniste)? The difficulty perhaps lies in their evolution
and transformation in the very course of the Logic, such that Being – if a
category at all – is not meant at all to be the same kind of category as
the Notion which concludes the series; thus, to impose this term or
classification on the moments from the outset would be to force this
development into a rigid and uniform mould. But if these moments
cannot be ranged under the classification Category, then what are they
exactly?
It is a question which raises even more general questions about the
space in which such ‘categories’ develop, questions we did not have to
pose for Kant or Aristotle. For the latter, they are simply the various
things that can be ‘said’ about a being or a phenomenon. In this way,
Aristotle paradoxically rejoins his modern semiotic critics (Benveniste,
Eco) who have maintained that his ‘categories’ are merely the
projections and hypostases of a local Indo-European grammar. Yet
Aristotle did himself already locate them in speech (even if he failed to
raise the issue of the epistemological relativity of languages as such).
As for Kant, not yet being a Habermassian or feeling the sway of any
structuralist or postmodern doxa about the primacy of language and
communication, he sticks to the mind itself and grasps the categories as
so many ‘concepts of the understanding’ which operate both judge-
ments and those perceptions understood to be mental ‘syntheses of
representations’. Still, he disposes of some fairly recognisable tradi-
tional ‘space’ – the mind – in which, as in Aristotle’s ‘speaking’, the
categories can comfortably be housed and find their field of efficacity.
Whatever Hegel thinks about mind or language, those are not the
‘places’ in which his categories evolve; and to call those Spirit or
even Objective Spirit is to beg the question, insofar as it is precisely the
space of the categories which will be called on to define Spirit in the
first place.
So they seem relatively placeless and disembodied: they are not the
thoughts of a Mind, even a transcendental one (since for one thing, they
are not yet even thoughts as such); whatever Absolute Spirit may be,
or however Hegel’s combination of Substance and Subject may be
understood, it is not an omniscient and anthropomorphised narrator of
some sort. In fact, I tend to think it would be better to imagine the
‘space’ of Hegel’s categories in the absence of all such modern
container notions of subjectivity or of element, in a kind of space-
lessness. This makes the categories in Hegel far more situation- or
event-specific; all the while acknowledging the evident fact that
whatever ‘space’ or ‘context’ may be invoked, it will always also itself
be precisely one of those categories it was alleged to have governed or
 A note on reification in Hegel’s logic 37

contained. Thus once again here we confront the well-known paradox

of the ‘class which is a member of itself’, something ‘solved’ by the
attempt to imagine a state of things – or better still a type of discourse –
itself free of such representational homogeneity, and able to accom-
modate a series of ‘events’ without a frame or background. As this was,
however, very precisely a central feature of allegory for us, we might
thereby justify an allegorical look at Hegel’s Logic from an unaccus-
tomed standpoint. Add to this the characterisation of these moments
as somehow related to pensée sauvage in that the Logic effectuates
the construction of local universals out of particulars in a situation in
which universals do not yet exist, and we have an even more
paradoxical approach to Hegel opening up before us. (Perhaps, to
anticipate, one might justify the approach by saying that, even though
Hegel emerges long after the coming into being of universals – this is,
after all, the very definition of Western philosophy – we may posit a
deliberate suspension of universals in his new ‘speculative’ dramatisa-
tion of the categories themselves.)
But other important questions associated with the notion of the
category remain. In particular, there is the Kantian question of their
number: can they all not be reduced to four groups of three? If not why
not? And in view of Hegel’s insistence on the ‘necessity’ of their
unfolding (see below), are we to believe that he thinks he has given us a
complete list? In other words, one way of testing (or ‘falsifying’)
philosophically his programme is on the basis of its completeness: can
categories be added that he has not thought of? If so, where and why?
And to historicise all this even further, can we imagine the historical
coming into being of new categories which did not exist in Hegel’s time;
or the disappearance of older ones? And what of pensée sauvage?
Although Lévi-Strauss is very far from considering this tribal
perceptual science as ‘primitive’ – in fact he characterises it as
‘structuralist’ avant la lettre – he certainly argues for its radical
difference from our own (Western, bourgeois) thinking, something that
entitles us to wonder whether the same list of categories remains in
force in tribal times (or in other modes of production). It is the Whorf–
Sapir question, which turns very much on the matter of categories as
such, and which is perhaps in the present case exacerbated by what is
often enough considered to be Hegel’s Eurocentrism.
Now I come to my second preliminary observation, which has to
do with temporality. Nor is this simply a matter of organisation or
Darstellung (presentation, staging), according to which Hegel projects
the narrative fiction of an unfolding series or sequence in order the
more effectively to string the pearls of the categories one after the other.
If it were merely a matter of organisation, one would expect the
38 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3

account of each category to be a relatively static affair, so that one might

open up what is after all called an Encyclopedia and consult this or that
entry, in case of need extracting the ‘definition’ of substance, say, or
necessity, or limit, in order to find out exactly what Hegel thought. But
we cannot do this, because the temporal sequence of the categories
purports to stage the self-production, the self-development and self-
unfolding of the Notion itself. We would therefore minimally expect
any given category to require, for complete discussion, an account of
what precedes and what follows it, in what we have seen to be the non-
space of the text. This is to say that each conceptual item in effect
produces its own context, which it equally well abolishes on its own
transformation into something else. The categories are thus all
situation- or context-specific, provided we understand that there is
no overall situation or context, no overall conceptual landscape, given
in advance.
What this means for the reader is that the Logic is no traditional piece
of philosophical discourse: it does not, even turgidly and laboriously,
attempt to expound some idea which the reader then attempts, by
retracing the steps of the argument, to recreate and thus to grasp or
‘understand’. Or rather, this does seem to happen at specific moments,
and we certainly still do struggle to understand what Hegel meant by
this or that; but the act of reading the Logic is a great deal more
complicated than that, and requires, as with a complicated novel, that
we dispose of larger units of memory in which to organise the
individual episodes. Better still the Logic is like a piece of music, and its
text a score, which we must ourselves mentally perform (and even
orchestrate). As was so often said about the modernist texts, we can
only reread it, and each reading performance brings out new and more
subtle interrelationships (thematic repeats, details of the orchestration,
harmonic ingenuities) which we had not heard or noticed before. And
sometimes the rereadings also make us more receptive to the great
climaxes, the melodramatic reversals (Adorno used to say that the
great affirmation, ‘Essence must appear’, was like a hammerblow in
Beethoven). The analogy does not perhaps fully bear out Greimas’s
hypothesis that the philosophical text is also, in its deeper structure, a
narrative. In any case, the aesthetic set towards the text moves it away
from philosophising and argument, let alone truth, and thereby risks
depriving it of its most fundamental driving impulse and passion,
indeed, its very justification. So the more we insist on the pleasure of
rereading the Logic, the less in the long run we are tempted to read it in
the first place.
So let’s now say all this in a very different way by insisting on the
failures which constitute the Logic’s deeper record; most philosophical
 A note on reification in Hegel’s logic 39

discourse claims a certain conceptual success it hopes to record

successfully, and even to convey. Hegel’s moments are by definition
moments of failure: the failure to think, to win through to the concept,
to achieve even a limited but complete act of intellection. The task of
his writing will therefore be paradoxically self-defeating: to demon-
strate (successfully) how completely we must necessarily fail to think
this or that category. But in order for it to be meaningful, the failure
must be a very basic and fundamental one, it must come as the result of
loyally attempting to think, and at the end of a strenuous and absolute
assault on the category in question. And it is to be sure a frustrating
matter: who can find it in them to act out a cause lost in advance, an
experiment conducted with a view to proving itself impossible? What
saves the matter, no doubt, is the simple fact that, however much they
may be intellectual or conceptual failures, the categories are the stuff of
daily life and daily speech, rehearsed over and over again, and quite
impossible to replace with anything better, purer, more utopian;
nor does Hegel try to do so, even though he does seem to posit
‘philosophising’ as some activity not altogether accessible to the
masses.
In any case, we will still need to ward off the impression that all
these failures are somehow ‘the same’, just as we will have to guard
against the supposition that all the transitions from one category, one
failure, to the next are somehow ‘the same’, let alone the implication
that the so-called categories themselves are in their form somehow
comparable, if not identical. The terms for all these things fatally
reinforce such implications and illusions: if you use the word ‘category’
for a variety of concepts, classifying them all under this particular
genus, have you not admitted a fundamental kinship in advance? And
if we call Hegel’s conceptual movement through the text and its
moments ‘dialectical’, do we not also imply a certain uniformity, a
standard momentum, a repetition of the same transitions, the same
metamorphoses? This may be why Hegel uses words like dialectical,
truth, rational, reason, sparingly; whereas the text itself repeatedly
characterises the kinds of errors and illusions described above in this
very paragraph: they are the baleful effects of Verstand, of ‘under-
standing’, of an external and spatial picture-thinking (Vorstellung) it is
tempting to identify with the more modern (although still no doubt
distantly Hegelian) term of reification. Verstand is reified, reifying
thinking, its domain is the real world of Being, of physical objects,
which we meet in part I of the Logic . But already we can make a few
anticipatory remarks about it.
Verstand, although omnipresent, and the very thinking of daily life
itself, is the villain of the piece. We cannot say that throughout the
40 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3

Logic, Hegel tracks down the truth like a detective, but we can certainly
say that he tracks error, and that error always and everywhere takes the
form of Verstand. The Logic is therefore not a Bildungsroman, where the
little Notion grows up and learns about the world, and eventually
reaches maturity and autonomy: that could be, perhaps, the narrative
schema of the Philosophy of History, and can still be detected in various
scattered remarks throughout the former work. Rather, Verstand is the
great magician, the Archimago, of the work, the primal source of error
itself, and of all the temptations – to persist in one moment, for
example, and to make one’s home there. Unlike the Faerie Queene,
however, if there is a villain, there are no heroes: none of the knights,
not the Dialectic, not Reason (Vernunft), not Truth, nor Speculative
Thinking, nor even the Notion itself, go forth to do battle with this
baleful force (although it might perhaps be argued that Philosophy is
itself such a heroic contender, which, besides meaning Hegel, also
means all those other positive things). And this may have something to
do with the fact that Verstand also has its place, as we have suggested,
and can not only not be done away with for good: it would be
undesirable to do so, it is the taming and proper use of this mode,
rather than its eradication, that is wanted. Sin and error in Spenser are
no doubt equally difficult to eradicate, or to imagine fully eradicated,
but the virtuous or Christian mind continues to wish for such an
eventuality and to hope for a realm in which something of the sort
might be realised. Whatever the reign of Absolute Spirit might be,
it would not seem to presume that; nor could that be the upshot of
the notorious ‘end of History’, even assuming there is such a thing in
Hegel.
I can be briefer about Hegel’s idealism, a reproach relatively
unseasonable, insofar as there do not seem to be any idealists any
more in the first place (even though everyone likes to talk about
materialism). I suppose there would be some agreement about
distinguishing from idealism something called spiritualism, which,
despite all kinds of religious revivals, does not seem to me to be
particularly extant any longer either. Perhaps, in some more figurative
and ideological sense, idealism consists in a drawing away from the
body and a consistent sublimation of everything that could be
associated with sheer physicality. Here we are on firmer ground, and
it is certain that the fundamental movement in Hegelianism consists in
a deep suspicion, not only of the perceptual (the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the
opening of the Phenomenology), but of the immediate as such. But can
there be a mediated materialism, a mediated body which would remain
what we still call the body? Yet there are paradoxes to be observed
here, and it is important to remember, or to understand in the first
 A note on reification in Hegel’s logic 41

place, that Marx’s ‘fetishism of commodities’ is not some unmediated

materialism either, but on the contrary a tainted kind of unconscious
spiritualism in its own right.
As for ‘idealism’ in Hegel’s usage in the text, however, its proper
translation lies very far from all such considerations, and simply means
the quotient of theory in all those discourses claiming to stick to the
facts, claiming to eschew metaphysical speculations and to keep faith
with a stubborn empiricism of common sense and everyday life. The
argument was renewed in the 1960s by all the varied partisans of
theory, who delighted in demonstrating with gusto that all these
Anglo-American empirical statements which formed our then hege-
monic discourse were deeply if secretly theoretical at their heart, and
that plain homespun realistic thinking was rotten to the core with
theoretical presuppositions. Such was already Hegel’s battle with the
scientists and the other ‘realists’: ‘This ideality of the finite is the chief
maxim of philosophy; and for that reason every genuine philosophy is
idealism’ (section 95).
The supreme example of such ideality (or theoreticity) active at the
very heart of what seems to be sheerly empirical or of the ‘fact’, the
external, finite, physical and the like, is mathematics: ‘quantity, of
course, is a stage of the Idea; and as such it must have its due’ (section
99). Number is the very epitome of such frozen or crystallised theory:
emerging from the dialectic between the Continuous and the Discrete,
its deployments are supremely philosophical (as Wallace puts its, ‘all
reckoning is therefore making up the tale’ – he has added his own pun
in the German word er-zählen (section 102).
This hidden presence of the idealities, the categories, behind our
more seemingly external experiences and perceptions, is somehow
nonetheless capable of eluding Kantian subjectivism: for it does not
seem to push all our ‘intuitions’ back inside the individual mind, to be
processed into thoughts and knowledge. Hegel’s ‘idealism’ is not
subjectivising in this Kantian sense insofar as the frame of the
individual subject is lacking from his scheme. He benefits from the
historical good luck of an absence of individualism which can be
judged pre- or post-individualistic alike, the technical reason being, of
course, that the individual emerges only at the end of his series, with
the Notion, leaving earlier developments relatively innocent of the
effects of a subject–object split. Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism has
famously been termed a ‘Kantianism without the transcendental
subject’, and we have counted him also among the philosophers of
the ‘category’. With all due qualifications, Hegelian ‘idealism’ might be
thought of in a similar way: everything we see and think by definition
comes through our minds and consciousness, and so even materialists
42 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3

are idealistic in this sense. Yet at the end of the series of categories,
‘speculative thinking’, the thought of the Notion or Concept (Begriff),
reaffirms the subject–object split anew by asserting the identity
between the two; at this point perhaps, Hegel has again become an
idealist in the traditional sense, but not until then.