Nov 30, 2012
Page 467
Hegel is the ultimate thinker of the process of the emergence of necessary features out of chaotic contingency of contingency’s gradual self-organization of the gradual rise of order out of chaos
How, then, can necessity arise out of contingency? The only way to avoid the obscurantism of “emergent properties” is to bring into play negativity: at its most radical, necessity is not a positive principle of regularity that overcomes contingency, but the negative obverse of contingency: what is “necessary” above all is that every contingent particular entity find its truth in its self-cancellation, disintegration, death. Let us imagine an entity which persists in its singularity, endeavoring to impose itself as a lasting necessity―the actual necessity is the negativity which destroys this entity. This is Hegelian universal necessity in its actuality: the negative power which brings to its truth every particularity by way of destroying it. Necessity is thus nothing but the “truth” of contingency, contingency brought to its truth by way of its (self-)negation.
The standard view of Hegel’s system is that of a closed circle of categories which succeed one another with a logical necessity, and the critical energy is focused on the “weak points” of that deduction, on passages where Hegel seems to “cheat,” proposing a new category which does not really follow from what precedes it. This perspective must be radically reversed: each passage in Hegel is a moment of creative invention, the New does not arise automatically but comes as a miraculous surprise.
This is what it means to reproduce a process through its dialectical analysis: to re-introduce possibility and ontological openness into what retroactively appears as a closed succession determined by its immanent necessity.
So when Hegel says that, in a dialectical process, the thing becomes what it always already was, this clearly offers itself to be read as an assertion of full ontological closure: there is nothing radically new, what emerges in the dialectical movement is just the full actualization of what was in potentia (or in itself) already there. However, the same statement can also be read in a much more radical (and literal) way: in a dialectical process, the thing becomes “what it always already was”; that is, the “eternal essence” (or, rather, concept) of a thing is not given in advance, it emerges, forms itself in an open contingent process―the eternally past essence is a retroactive result of the dialectical process. This retroactivity is what Kant was not able to think, and Hegel himself had to work long and hard to conceptualize it.
Here is how the early Hegel, still struggling to differentiate himself from the legacy of the other German Idealists, qualifies Kant’s great philosophical breakthrough: in the Kantian transcendental synthesis, “the determinateness of form is nothing but the identity of opposites. As a result, the a priori intellect becomes, at least in principle, a posteriori as well; for a posteriority is nothing but the positing of the opposite.”18
In principle, the meaning of this dense passage seems clear: the “determinateness of form” is another name for concrete universality, for the fact that the universal form of a concept generates out of itself its particular content, that it is not merely a form imposed on an independent empirical content. And since the notional universality and the particularity of its content―in short, the a priori of the universal form and the a posteriori of its content―are the opposites (precisely the opposites that Kant keeps apart, ultimately external to each other, since the immanent transcendental form is imposed onto a content that affects the subject from the outside), the determinateness of form equals the unity of opposites, the fact that the content is generated by its form. The question is how, concretely, we are to read this identity of opposites. The standard critical reading is satisfied with seeing in it the very model of how the Idea mediates or posits all its particular content, that is, as the extreme “idealist” affirmation of the primacy of the a priori over the a posteriori. What such a reading clearly misses is the opposite movement, the irreducible “umbilical cord” on account of which every a priori universality remains attached to (“overdetermined” by) the a posteriori of a particular content. To put it somewhat bluntly: yes, the universal notional form imposes necessity upon the multitude of its contingent contents, but it does so in a way which itself remains marked by an irreducible stain of contingency―or, as Derrida would have put it, the frame itself is always also a part of the enframed content. The logic here is that of the Hegelian “oppositional determination” (gegensätzliche Bestimmung), in which the universal genus encounters itself among its particular and contingent species.