1 Hegel, G. W. F., Wissenschaft der Logik I, p. 20 / Hegel's Science of Logic, translated by Miller, A. V. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), p. 31.Google Scholar Hereafter, I will refer to these as WLI SL. Unless stated otherwise, Hegel's texts are quoted from Hegel, G. W. F.: Werke, edited by Moldenhauer, E. and Michel, K. M. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).Google Scholar

2 Cf. Hegel, G. W. F., Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988), p. 335 / Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Miller, A. V. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 308.Google Scholar Hereafter I will refer to these as Phen. Hegel considers language “the perfect element, in which interiority is just as external as externality is interior” (Phen. p. 473/p. 439, translation modified).

3 See for the latter position, among many others, Gadamer, H.-G., Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. B. C. Mohr, 1960), pp. 385, 398 / Truth and Method, translated by Weinsheimer, J. and Marshall, D. G. (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), pp. 407–408,421.Google Scholar

4 Elsewere I have systematically investigated Heidegger's critique of metaphysics and the way he seeks to overcome Hegel's philosophy. See my Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger's Encounter with Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000)Google Scholar. Insofar as the interpretation of Hegel's conception of thought and language I propose in the present article starts out from Hegel, it may be considered as complementing the book on Heidegger and Hegel; it is only the latter's argumentation, however, that I believe truly sustains the critique of Hegel indicated at the end of the article.

5 I should mention here the well-known passage of the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit which explains the difference between the classical subjectpredicate proposition and the articulation of the dialectical movement of thought. Since one single proposition is incapable of expressing this movement, it of itself calls for the articulation of the contrary that already inheres in the first proposition (Phen. pp. 47-48/pp. 39-40). However, Hegel here also limits himself to the formal aspect of the articulation of speculative truth and does not mention the role of language in this respect. In the Logic, he praises the German language for its capacity to let some words express contrary meanings; thus, containing their contrary within themselves, these words attest to the “speculative spirit” of this language. Hegel is reasonable enough, though, to consider this merely a fortunate coincidence (WL I, pp. 20, 114 / SL, pp. 32, 107).

6 WL II, p. 295 / SL p. 618.

7 Cf. WL II, p. 400 / SL pp. 702-703.

8 Cf. on the “original word”: WL II, p. 550 / SL p. 825, and on the “dead bones of logic”: WL I, p. 48 / SL p. 53. Hyppolite, Jean's book Logique et existence (Paris: PUF, 1952)Google Scholar, the first part of which is entitled “Langage et logique,” is at least partly devoted to the question as to how being can articulate itself in man and how, conversely, man can become universal consciousness by virtue of language (p. 6). This leads Hyppolite to ask in what way Hegel's own language, which consists in the articulation of the essential, differs from the natural or human language of which it is born (pp. 31, 65). In order to answer this question, he mainly elaborates on Hegel's analysis of language in the Encyclopaedia (pp. 35-42) and on the remarks concerning the speculative proposition in the Introduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit (pp. 185-94). He concludes that the ultimate “element” of language and thought, in which being and meaning reflect one another, is the logos (p. 246). I do not quite see, however, how this determination of the logos provides an answer to the central questions of the book. Simon, Josef, in Das Problem der Sprache bei Hegel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966)Google Scholar, also starts out from the question concerning the essence of language. He maintains that this question bears on the system as such and hence cannot be elaborated in a specific part of the Encyclopaedia (pp. 15, 171).

9 In The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, John McCumber also distances himself from interpretations that either focus on Hegel's all-encompassing system or on the texts that bear on the finite and historical side of reality (p. 20). According to him, however, Hegel is not trying to reconcile God and history, or time and eternity, but “is simply trying to coordinate two different sets of words: those actually in use around him, belonging to a historically developed … language called High German; and the reformed company [of words] produced by his System itself” (p. 24). Thus distinguishing between historical “representational names” and “names as such,” McCumber argues that only the latter are fully capable of expressing philosophical thought. This linguistic approach entails, I think, a few problems. First, it seems very improbable that the relation between philosophical thought and language can be sufficiently clarified by reducing the whole of Hegel's work to a “rational reform of language” (p. 20). Second, McCumber's interpretation presupposes a questionable opposition between conceptual comprehension and extraphilosophical or extralinguistic reality: the System is said to be able to comprehend the extraphilosophical world (cf. pp. 20, 328). Since McCumber does not seem to distinguish between the language that pertains to sense-experience and the language of traditional, pre-Hegelian philosophy, he fails to see thata//philosophical concepts are different from empirical concepts in that they do not pertain to objects that can be experienced by the senses, and hence have no referents. Therefore, it does not make sense to distinguish between philosophy and extraphilosophical reality or between thought and matter here (cf. WL I, p. 43 / SL p. 49). Hegel's system pertains to reality only insofar as it can become the object of philosophical knowledge, that is to say, only insofar as its phenomena attest to the essential dynamic of self-determination: “chemism,” “life,” and “love” are not representational names if such names are supposed to indicate something that exists in the world independent of our interpretation of that world. Third, once McCumber has reduced the problem of conceptuality to the problem of language he has to answer the question as to how the system can accomplish the synthesis between (historical) representational names and (immanent) names as such (p. 307). I do not see why one should take recourse to the idea that the system develops itself by taking up an existing representational name that is merely homonymous with the name as such that articulates a pure moment of the system (p. 309). The only, but decisive, difference between Hegel's system and traditional philosophy is that Hegel uncovers the totality of pure concepts as the result of the self-determining movement of the absolute concept and hence no longer takes them as independent entities.

10 Schelling, F. W. J., “Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft,” in Schellings Werke, Vol. 1, edited by Schroter, M. (München: Beck, 1927), p. 705Google Scholar / Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, translated by Harris, E. E. and Heath, P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 41 (translation modified).Google Scholar

11 Schelling, F. W. J., System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), p. 11Google Scholar / System of Transcendental Idealism, translated by Heath, P. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), p. 6.Google Scholar

12 Schelling, “Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur,” p. 706 / Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, p. 42.

13 The concept that constitutes the foundation of all specific concepts “is not sensuously intuited or represented; it is solely an object, a product and content of thinking, and it is the absolute, self-subsistent matter (Sache), the logos, the reason (Vernunft) of that which is, the truth of what determines the name of things; it is least of all the logos which should be left outside the science of logic” (WL I, p. 30 / SL p. 39, translation modified). In the Logic the concept is understood to sublate the one-sidedness of the basic categories “being” and “essence” (cf. WL II, pp. 15-16 / SL p. 391). Aristotle calls that through which something is what it is the logos of a thing, that is to say, its essence, ultimate cause and principle. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983 a 29.

14 In his early text on Fichte and Schelling, Hegel designates the totality to which the sciences of nature and spirit aspire the “self-construction of the absolute.” Hegel, G. W. F., “Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie,” in Jenaer Schrifte, p. 111Google Scholar / The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy, translated by Harris, H. S. and Cerf, W. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), p. 170.Google Scholar

15 Since the Logic is not concerned with space and time, it cannot, like the Phenomenology of Spirit, start out from immediate sense-perception. The beginning of the Logic is not “an immediate of sensuous intuition or of representation, but of thinking, which on account of its immediacy may also be called a supersensuous, inner intuition” (WL II, p. 553 / SL pp. 827-28). Hegel would maintain, however, that the enactment of empirical senseperception and of the concept's self-determination into the category “being”—such that this category first opens up the perspective within which beings can be experienced as beings—are two sides of the same coin. According to the Phenomenology, the “truth” of sense-perception consists in the affirmation that something “is”; its truth solely contains the being of the object (Phen. p. 69 / p. 58).

16 Cf.: “Therefore we must not take the identity of soul and body as a mere connection, but in a deeper way, i.e., we must regard the body and its members as the existence of the systematic articulation of the concept itself. In the members of the living organism the concept gives to its determinations an external being in nature. …” Hegel, G. W. F., Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, p. 161, cf. pp. 177-78 / Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, translated by Knox, T. M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 119Google Scholar, cf. p. 132; cf. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III, pp. 19–20 / Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, translated by Wallace, W. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 9-11 (§381, add.).Google Scholar

17 Hegel, Enzyklopädie III, p. 21 / Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, p. 11 (§381, add.). In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel states that whenever we address something we do not articulate its singularity, but solely that which constitutes its universality and hence belongs to the sphere of what is universal in itself, that is to say, to consciousness (Phen. pp. 77-78 / p. 66).

18 Cf. Hegel, G. W. F., Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I, p. 41 / Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1, translated by Haldane, E. S. (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 22-23.Google Scholar

19 “The point of transition, the middle term through which identity constructing itself as nature passes over to identity constructing itself as intelligence, is the internalization of the light of nature, the lightning stroke of the ideal upon the real, as Schelling calls it, its self-constitution as point.” Hegel, Jenaer Schrifte, p. 111 / The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy, p. 170, cf. Schelling, F. W. J., “Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie,” in Schellings Werke, Vol. 3, edited by Schröter, M. (München: Beck, 1927), p. 101 (§145).Google Scholar

20 As in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel in his Jena lectures on the philosophy of spirit from 1805-1806 calls language the true being of spirit as spirit. Through language, man articulates the being of objects, as distinguished from what appears to him through mere sense-perception: “Thus, it is through the name that the object is born out of the I as being. This is the first creating force that spirit exerts. Adam gave a name to all things. This is … the first appropriation of nature as a whole, or its creation by spirit.… Spirit relates to itself; it says to the donkey: you are something interior (ein Innres) and this inferiority am I, and your being is a sound that I have arbitrarily invented. Donkey is a sound, which is something entirely different from the sensible being itself.” That is to say, by naming an animal “donkey,” man gives rise to the essence or being of this animal and thus distinguishes the actual animal, which does not belong to the realm of spirit itself, from the animal insofar as it does belong to the realm of spirit and hence is of the same nature as the I. Hegel, G. W. F., Jenaer Realphilosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1969), pp. 183–84Google Scholar / Hegel and the Human Spirit, translated by Rauch, L. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), pp. 89–90 (translation modified);Google Scholar cf. Hegel, G. W. F., Jenaer Systementwürfe I: Das System der spekulativen Philosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986), p. 2011Google Scholar / System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, translated by Harris, H. and Knox, T. M. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1979), pp. 221–22.Google Scholar

21 This does not mean that Hegel would consider the advent of speech an empirical, historical event determining the concept's development. On the contrary, it is, from his perspective, always the essential self-determination of the concept that determines the course of history insofar as that course is rational or essential.

22 Hegel, G. W. F., Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte I (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1955), p. 162Google Scholar / Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, translated by Nisbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 134.Google Scholar Hereafter I will refer to these as VPW / LPW.

23 VPW pp. 162,167/LPW pp. 134, 138.1 will not consider Hegel's problematic identification of this “prehistory” with the African world, in which, according to him, spirit is still “unconscious of itself” and immediately united with nature (cf. Ibid., p. 218 / p. 178). See on this issue Bernasconi, R., “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti,” in Hegel after Derrida, edited by Barnett, S. (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 41–63.Google Scholar

24 VPW p. 166 I LPW p. 137 (translation modified).

25 “The powerlessness of nature is to be attributed to its only being able to maintain the conceptual determinations in an abstract manner, and to its exposing the realization of the particular to external determinability.” Hegel, G. W. F., Enzyklopädie II, p. 203 / Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, edited and translated by Petry, M. J. (London and New York: Humanities Press, 1970), p. 215 (translation modified) (§250, cf. §248 rem.).Google Scholar

26 “This powerlessness on the part of nature sets limits to philosophy, and it is the height of pointlessness to demand of the concept that it should explain, and as it is said, construe or deduce these contingent products of nature.…” Ibid., p. 203 / p. 215 (translation modified) (§250 rem.).

27 VPW p. 166 / LPW p. 137. In Language and Death (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)Google Scholar, G. Agamben focuses on the “originary articulation of language” that consists in the passage from phoné to logos and cannot itself be articulated by means of human discourse (p. 84, cf. p. 34). He considers Western philosophy to have been incapable of reflecting on this “unspeakable foundation” (p. 66). By calling this event “the Voice” (p. 35) Agamben puts a name to a complex of philosophical problems concerning language. In my view, however, this name promises more than it actually achieves and certainly does not provide solutions to these problems. I do not see, for instance, what the following remark seeks to contribute: “The Voice is the originary ethical dimension in which man pronounces his “yes” to language and consents that it may take place” (p. 87).

28 See on this Clark, M., Logic and System (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 45.Google Scholar Whereas Hegel considers this separation the necessary condition of the overcoming of the cleft between thinking and that which is thought, Clark proposes to interpret language as an exteriority or otherness which from the outset constitutes the “unintelligible” of the Hegelian system and cannot be fully incorporated into it. Language thus causes thinking to remain always less than the whole to which it aspires (X-XI, p. 75). However, it would be more difficult to defend this view against Hegel if one considered that Hegel only demands of language that it adequately articulate philosophical thought and that language according to him does not resist this (cf. Hegel, Enzyklopädie III, p. 239 / Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, p. 187, §444 add.; see also McCumber, The Company of Words, p. 244). Insofar as language is unintelligible and arbitrary it is of no concern to philosophy, for the whole to which philosophy aspires is only the whole of reality insofar as it is intelligible, that is to say, worthy to be called “reality.”

29 “Actual mind … has external nature for its proximate, and the logical idea for its first, presupposition.” Hegel, Enzyklopädie III, p. 18 / Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, p. 8 (§381, add.).

30 WL I, p. 20 / SL p. 31 (translation modified).

31 WL I, p. 27 / SL p. 37.

32 WL II, p. 553 / SL pp. 827-28.

33 “[T]he concrete forms assumed by the logical categories in nature, which would be space and time,” can be of no concern to the logical science (WL II, p. 257 / SL p. 586). Therefore the Logic, unlike the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Spirit, cannot comprehend the concrete appearances of consciousness either: “[T]he idea of spirit as the subject matter of logic already stands within the pure science; it has not therefore to watch spirit progressing through its entanglements with nature, with immediate determinateness and material things, or with representation.… In the logical idea of spirit, therefore, the T is immediately the free concept… which in its judgements is itself its object…” (WL II, p. 496 / SL p. 782, translation modified).

34 “In respect of spirit and its works, just as in the case of nature, we must guard against being sofar misled by a well-meant endeavour after rational language, as to try to exhibit the necessity of phenomena which are marked by a decided contingency.… Thus in language (although it be, as it were, the body of thought) chance still unquestionably plays a decided part; and the same is true of the creations of law, art, etc.” (Hegel, Enzyklopädie I, p. 286 / Hegel's Logic, p. 206, translation modified [§145, add.]). See on this Cook, D. J., Language in the Philosophy of Hegel (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973), p. 158.Google Scholar Hegel notes in the third part of the Encyclopaedia that it is precisely the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning, that is, the sign-character of language, which allows thinking to direct itself to the meaning of words without being disturbed by their sensible side {Enzyklopädie III, p. 269 / Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, p. 212, §457 add.). Josef Simon regards Hegel's conception of the sign-character of language as the presupposition of the whole Hegelian system: only if words, as signs, guarantee an immediate and unambiguous access to their meaning can Hegel—implicitly—presuppose that language is the fundamental precondition of his system and at the same time maintain that his scientific system does not presuppose anything (Simon, Das Problem der Sprache bei Hegel, pp. 171-72, 177-79).

35 “Hence the Logic exhibits the self-movement of the absolute idea only as the original word, which is an externalization or utterance (Äusserung), but an externalization which is such that it, as something external, has immediately vanished again when it comes into being; the idea is, therefore, only in this selfdetermination of apprehending itself; it is in pure thought, in which difference is not yet otherness, but is and remains perfectly transparent to itself” (WL II, p. 550 / SL p. 825, translation modified).

36 I believe that Hegel's argumentation here and elsewhere is based on a distinction between two different ways for something to be dependent on something else. Thus, history is in a certain sense dependent on time to actually accomplish itself, while its essential phases are nevertheless determined solely by the dialectical self-overcoming of the one-sidedness proper to the former phase. Likewise, speculative thought needs the work of discursive understanding to accomplish itself by sublating the oppositions that this understanding brings about, while it does not need to let itself be determined by discursive understanding. In other words, Hegel must rigorously distinguish between the subordinate, secondary means that are necessary to actually accomplish a movement and the principle that governs this movement from beginning to end without ever being seriously threatened by these means. In “Absolute Reflexion und Sprache,” Werner Marx addresses the issue of the subservience of language to thought concluding that language, in making thought manifest, is indeed a “servant” to thought, albeit a servant that preserves a certain self dependence (Marx, W., “Absolute Reflexion und Sprache,” in Natur und Geschichte: Festschrift für Karl Löwith, edited by Braun, H. and Riedel, M. [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967], p. 253).Google Scholar If one feels unsatisfied with this straightforward affirmation of Hegel's own view, one possible way of deconstructing the presuppositions that guide Hegel's philosophy would be to question Hegel's effort to maintain a rigid distinction between the necessary means and the determining principle on so many levels of his philosophy, while the famous section on the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology precisely shows this distinction to be untenable.

37 Ordinary thinking, as Hegel remarks in the Logic, “must be referred back to the previously-mentioned beginning of science made by Parmenides, who purified and elevated his own figurate conception and so, too, that of posterity, to pure thought, to being as such, and thereby created the element of science” (WL I, p. 90 / SL p. 88). This is the element in which pure thought can subsequently develop its different stages: “Now in reference to this idea, I maintain that the sequence in the systems of philosophy in history is similar to the sequence in the logical deduction of the conceptual determinations of the idea. I maintain that if the fundamental concepts of the systems appearing in the history of philosophy be entirely divested of what regards their outward form, their relation to the particular and the like, the various stages of the determination of the idea are found in their logical concept” (Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophic I, p. 49 / Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 30 [translation modified]; cf. Enzyklopädie I, p. 59 / Hegel's Logic, translated by Wallace, W. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], p. 19 [§14])Google Scholar. Hegel would maintain that the pure categories articulated in the Logic somehow inhere in all languages of Western culture, albeit that each of them has its particular character. Thus the philosophical words “τò òV,” “sein,” “être,” and “being” can by means of different sounds all indicate the same ontological concept. Being a particular product of Western rationality, the German language allows philosophy to articulate explicitly the categorial distinctions that can—more or less clearly—also be found in other languages; thus, according to Hegel, in many languages the word “is” is used in a way different from the word “exist” (cf. WL II, p. 407 / SL pp. 708-709). And if it is actually the specific structure of, for instance, Greek grammar that led Greek philosophers to explicitly articulate certain ontological distinctions, then this only means that the implicit, silent self-articulation of the absolute concept began as soon as speech itself.

38 Hegel, Enzyklopädie III, p. 280 / Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, p. 221 (translation modified) (§462 add.).

39 Josef Simon conceives of the essence of language as its capacity to overcome or sublate the cleft between subject and object. At the same time he holds that language itself entails the occultation of this essence; the essence of language must appear in finite, concrete languages, which precisely bring about objectivity and hence the opposition between subject and object (Simon, Das Problem der Sprache bei Hegel, pp. 13-14,179,182). Simon thus seems to consider the Logic as manifesting the essence of language: the experience of the absolute, he notes, accomplishes itself as the experience of the essence of language (pp. 13, 15), that is to say, of the capacity of language to overcome the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity which it also must bring about. However, Simon mainly elaborates on Hegel's analysis of the human aspects of language such as the voice (cf. pp. 55-62, 69-74).

40 See Marx, “Absolute Reflexion und Sprache,” p. 247, cf. Phen. pp. 34-35 / pp. 26-28. Marx rightly notes that while the actual sentences of the Logic consist in much more than pure categories, the Logic “moves, as it were, beyond the individual sentences” to achieve the logical cohesion of these categories (p. 248).

41 Phen. pp. 77-78/ p. 66.

42 Blanchot, M., “La littérature et le droit à la mort,” in La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 329.Google Scholar Cf. Dastur, F., La mort: essai sur la finitude (Paris: Hatier, 1994), p. 76.Google Scholar

43 Blanchot, “La litterature et le droit à la mort,” p. 329.

44 Ibid., p. 326.

45 Heidegger, M., Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993) (GA 68), p. 32 (my translation).Google Scholar

46 Ibid., p. 31.

47 On this point, there seems to be little difference between Heidegger and Derrida. The latter also conceives of the domain of metaphysics as limited by presence and based on the exclusion of what it cannot incorporate. However, Derrida in some of his (later) texts emphasizes not so much the prevailing of presence, as Heidegger does, but rather the exclusion of something that is neither a being nor an ontological event. In Glas, for instance, he asks: “Is there not always an element excluded from the system which assures the space of the system's possibility?” This question primarily pertains to Hegel's incapacity to provide a systematic place for the figure of the sister; the sister undermines as it were the system from within precisely because she refuses to be interpreted as either a particular living being—Hegel's sister—or a universal moment in the dialectical development of the family. Derrida thus seems even to try to overcome or avoid the difference between the level of beings (Blanchot) and of being (Heidegger) (Derrida, J., Glas II [Paris: Denoel / Gonthier, 1981], p. 227Google Scholar / Glas, translated by Leavey, J. P. and Rand, R. [Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1986], p. 162.Google Scholar Cf. Critchley, S., “A Commentary Upon Derrida's Reading of Hegel in Glas,” in Hegel after Derrida, esp. pp. 208–10).Google Scholar